Digital Hands ON - ARIANNA BETTI (University of Amsterdam): "The Spread of Wolff’s Mathematical Method in 18th century Germany - A Data-Driven Investigation"

Digital Hands ON: the new webinar series of the Groningen Centre for Digital Humanities highlighting new tools and methods.

Historical texts are crucial across Humanities fields, and a variety of digital methods both enhance and expand our possibilities for studying, exploring, editing, and manipulating them. This series brings together scholars and researchers from different domains to present innovative approaches, tools, methods, and research programmes that can help putting digital hands on historical records.

In this webinar, Arianna Betti (University of Amsterdam) will discuss The Spread of Wolff’s Mathematical Method in 18th century Germany - A Data-Driven Investigation.

Abstract

The Spread of Wolff’s Mathematical Method in 18th century Germany - A Data-Driven Investigation is a joint project with Hein van den Berg, Maria Chiara Parisi and Yvette Oortwijn.

We give a data-driven, quantitative assessment of the spread of Wolff’s mathematical method. To do so, we model Wolff’s mathematical method as a special take on traditional axiomatics (or as a variant of it). Along the way, we find incomparably stronger conceptual continuity in 18th century Germany’s sources on scientific method than commonly thought, with differences being on conceptually rather minor points (the relation between axioms and definitions).

Our quantitative assessment backs up purely qualitative work stressing continuity
between Wolff and e.g. Crusius, Kant and Lambert. These authors, in our terms, endorsed traditional axiomatics but were critical of Wolff’s specific variant.