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Current Research at ISERP

The Matter of Calculation: Early Modern Calculating Machines, Statecraft, and Thinking about Thinking

by Matthew Jones (History)

In the seventeenth century mathematicians devised calculating machines capable of performing arithmetical operations long considered the exclusive province of rational beings. The new machines invented by Blaise Pascal and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz challenged the boundary between the merely animal and rational capacities of human beings. Existing histories of early modern calculating machines largely chart their technological development with little attention to philosophical and political context or uses. Pascal and Leibniz initially conceived and produced their machines as practical tools of calculation for governance and scientific work. This project will first describe the local bureaucratic, political, and technical contexts, largely in France and Germany, in which Pascal and Leibniz developed their machines; and then will explore the philosophical, technological, and political implications they and others found in their machines into the eighteenth century.

This project will complement existing technical histories of the calculating machines by providing informed study of the political and bureaucratic contexts of their creation, their intended uses, and their philosophical and scientific implications.

The project aims to produce a text for an audience of general educated readers that (1) explores early modern concerns about the boundary between machine and human intelligence, (2) compares them with contemporary questions about artificial intelligence, and (3) underscores the interplay of intellectual innovation and artisanal skill in technological change.