ABSTRACT
A merely kinematic account of the transmission of scientific knowledge from one culture to another (where culture is understood mainly as a spatio-temporal region) would be a description of movements of scientific products (texts, concepts, theories, techniques, etc.), in abstraction from the forces underlying these movements. The principal aim of such a description would be to state when and where the transport of these products took place, and thus to determine the path of their movement. Since transmission is often accompanied by some kind of change, a kinematic approach is bound to take account of certain facts of transformation, such as the fact that the occurrence of a text at a later time differs linguistically from its occurrence at an earlier time (translation); or that the later occurrence is an otherwise different form (summary, revision, development, etc.) of the earlier one. When possible, names of persons are attached to such events: they serve as shorthand symbols that designate certain points or, rather, small regions on the space-time continuum - namely, the regions occupied by the named persons.
