Chapter 6 - Shifting Epistemological Perspectives in Ptolemy’s Harmonics

Summary

In the first sentence of his Harmonics Ptolemy offers a definition of the science to which his work is devoted, and – rather surprisingly – it contains nothing to indicate that Harmonics is concerned, specifically, with matters to do with music. On the contrary, the definition seems to say that it is concerned with sounds of all sorts, insofar as they differ from one another in pitch. We know, of course, that in fact the work does indeed focus almost exclusively on musical issues, but it turns out that Ptolemy does not narrow his perspective in a way that excludes further treatment of non-musical sounds until the closing stages of his fourth chapter. This chapter discusses the way in which he achieves the transition between the broader and narrower fields of investigation, while still holding fast to the definition from which he began.