The Institute for Research in Classical Philosophy and Science (IRCPS) is a not-for-profit educational corporation established in the USA (1983) and in Canada (2025). It is maintained and supported by scholars at various academic institutions around the world. Its primary purpose is to enhance higher education and to promote research in both the sciences and the humanities by fostering and promoting scholarly study concerning the history of the interaction between science and its interpretation in the various societies and language groups of premodern Eurasia and Africa. To meet this goal the IRCPS facilitates the dissemination of research and encourages cooperation between scholars whose work touches on the study of premodern science and its interpretation in its diverse social, cultural, and intellectual contexts. Currently, its primary activity is the publication of Aestimatio: Sources and Studies in the History of Science.
Aestimatio is owned by the IRCPS and is hosted by the University of Toronto Libraries.
The Institute has over the years organized and sponsored a number of professional conferences and workshops, as part of its mission to advance research in the history and philosophy of classical science. In 1986 it organized a major conference, “The Interaction of Science and Philosophy in Fifth and Fourth Century Greece”, that was held at the University of Pittsburgh and funded in part by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.
The proceedings of this conference, Science and Philosophy in Classical Greece, were published in 1991 (Sources and Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science 2). Since then, the Institute has sponsored or been involved in organizing smaller meetings on the Ptolemaic tradition (1988), Hellenistic astronomy (1989), Greek and Babylonian astronomy (1989, 1993), Greek and Roman science (1996), and celestial divination and astral magic (2003).
In 2004, the Institute began publication of Aestimatio: Critical Reviews in the History of Science and in 2016, it inaugurated Interpretatio: Sources and Studies in the History of Science series A and B. These publications were discontinued in 2020 and replaced by the single publication, Aestimatio: Sources and Studies in the History of Science.