Yoav Beirach
Yoav Beirach is a historian of science and philosopher, with research interests in the history of European music, early modern and medieval timekeeping technologies, and the philosophy, epistemology and experience of time.
His current project traces the origins of the concept, practices, and instruments of isochronism in late medieval and early modern Europe. This is the first genealogy of isochronism, or the idea of the “equality of time”, as it was transmitted from late premodern science to its actualization in the second pendulum and the 'harmonic oscialtor' in the seventeenth century and beyond. It traces the changes that premodern scientific discourses on periodicity — most notably music, astronomy, and economics — underwent once the new concept of isochronism offered an independent and quantitative unit as a measure of time. Yoav is an associate researcher at the ERC project "NOTCOM: Science and Consensus in the 17th Century," where his work focuses on the relationships between timekeeping technologies and the philosophy of time and music in Mersenne, Huygens, and Leibniz.
He was previously a postdoctoral fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin, in the research group "Experience in the Pre-Modern Sciences of Soul and Body, ca. 800–1650" (2024–26); a researcher in the project "Expanding Geometry in the 17th Century: A Migration of Knowledge from Weaving to Mathematics" at the Cohn Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Ideas, Tel Aviv University (2023–24); a postdoctoral fellow at the Department of Arts and Humanities in the Technion (2022–24); and a fellow at the Safra Center for Ethics, TAU (2021–22). Yoav's doctoral dissertation explored the history of harmonic theories in Europe, from their Pythagorean origins to early modern receptions and adaptations. It traced the aesthetic, mathematical, metaphysical, and techno-political debates and constructions that took part in the formation of the European tonal regime.
Yoav's first book, A Celestial Machine (forthcoming Winter 2027 with Springer Nature, coauthored with Paolo Rubini, Dustin Lazarovici and Osvaldo Ottavianni), is a translation, commentary and discussion on Leibniz's Machina coelestis, which presents a mechanical model of the solar system based on Leibniz's harmonic theory of planetary motion.
