Openness/Secrecy, Authorship, Ownership: Studies in the Technical, Practical, and Knowledge Traditions of Premodern and Early Modern Europe

当代科学和技术文化包括关于知识如何传播、谁拥有知识以及在什么时候应该公开传播（或者是否应该保密）的信仰和实践。科学通常被认为是公开的，而技术则是秘密的。这种理解和与之相关的实践是由复杂的知识产权法体系以及制度和隐性的个人实践形成的。然而，这些价值观、法律和实践的历史基础并没有得到很好的理解。该项目的目的是完成一本关于开放、保密、作者身份和知识产权所有权价值的书籍，因为这些与前现代的知识、实践和技术传统有关。该研究将研究从古代到17世纪早期的技术和实用著作。在方法上，本研究将首先考察特定的文本，然后探讨这些文本是如何被后来的文化挪用、理解或误解以及利用的。这项研究还将考察对知识传播和对作者身份的态度如何受到知识本身概念化的变化以及古代知识（episteme）、技术生产（techne）和军事行动（praxis）之间关系变化的影响。这本书将展示关于知识所有权和传播的价值观是如何广泛变化的，取决于特定的文化和社会，而不是普遍的思想结构。

Contemporary scientific and technical cultures include beliefs and practices concerning how knowledge is transmitted, who owns the knowledge, and at what point it should be openly disseminated (or whether it should be kept secret). Science is often presumed to be open, while technology is secret. Such understandings and the practices related to them are shaped by a complex system of intellectual property law as well as by institutional and tacit, individual practices. Yet the historical foundations of such values, laws and practices are not well understood. The purpose of this project is to complete a book-length history of the values of openness, secrecy, authorship and ownership of intellectual property as these pertain to premodern traditions of knowledge, practice and technology. The study will examine technical and practical writings from antiquity through the early seventeenth century. In method the study will first examine particular texts, then explore how those texts were appropriated, understood or misunderstood, and utilized by later cultures. The study will also examine how attitudes toward the transmission of knolwedge and towards authorship were influenced by changes in the conceptualization of knowledge itself and by changes in the relationships among the ancient categories of knowledge (episteme), technical production (techne), and military action (praxis). The book will demonstrate how values concerning the ownership and transmission of knowledge are widely variable and depend on particular cultures and societies rather than on universal structures of thought.