Mark Schiefsky

First and foremost, Mark Schiefsky is a historian of philosophy and science in the ancient world. Most of his work is concerned with the ways in which philosophy interacted with science in Greco-Roman antiquity: how philosophical theories shaped and were shaped by scientific inquiry in domains including medicine, mechanics, mathematics, and astronomy. His 2005 book studies these themes in the case of one of the most important texts of the Hippocratic Corpus, On Ancient Medicine, and reflects his longstanding interest in the concept of techne, "art" or "expertise."

In recent years he has been working on the reception of ancient Greek philosophy and science, particularly in the Arabic-speaking world but also in the Renaissance, with special attention to the Graeco-Arabic translation movement of the eighth to tenth centuries CE and its significance for texts such as Aristotle's Poetics.

A third area in which he works is digital humanities, focusing on creating structured digital corpora and developing software to apply techniques from natural language processing to texts in a variety of languages; through major sponsored projects, including the Archimedes Project and a Mellon Foundation project that produced a digital corpus of Greek and Arabic texts, he contributed to the creation of Arboreal, a software application for extracting and visualizing semantic networks, and continues to develop these resources to support a rigorous, multilingual approach to the history of science and philosophy.