Programme - The Losers of the Scientific Revolution
Bucharest-Princeton Seminar in Early Modern
Philosophy
Bran, 5–10 July 2012
The Losers of the Scientific Revolution
Programme
Friday, 5
July
9.30
Departure to Bran from Hotel Flowers, Plantelor str. 2, Bucharest (lunch on the way in Brașov)
17.00
Arrival in Bran (Vila Andra)
19.00 Dinner
Saturday, 6
July
9.30-10.30
Conference: Vlad Alexandrescu (Bucharest): Descartes et le rêve
(baconien) de “la plus haute et plus parfaite science”
10.30-10.45
Coffee break
10.45-13.00 Reading group (I): Baconianism and
Cartesianism. On Method
Convenors: Mihnea Dobre, Igor
Agostini
Texts:
Descartes's Regulae,
the Discourse, and the Objections; (fragments)
a chapter on
Bacon from Mersenne's La verité de sciences, pp. 206-224; Nicolas Poisson's Commentaire ou
remarques sur la methode de Descartes, pp. 54-72
13.00-15.00
Lunch break
16.00-16.35 Fabrizio
Baldassarri (Parma): Useless Victories and Useful Losses. Descartes and Losers in Scientific
Revolution
16.35-16.50
Coffee break
16.50-19.00 Reading group (II): Baconianism and
Cartesianism. On experiments
Convenors: Mihnea Dobre, Sophie
Roux
Texts: Rochon, Lettre d'un philosophe à un
cartésien de ces amis, p. 119-129, p. 141-55, p. 194-202; Mariotte, Essai
de logique, p. 8-33, p. 110-149); Jacques Rohault, System of Natural Philosophy, On Void, p. 56-68.
19.30 Dinner
Sunday, 7
July
9.15-9.50 Igor Agostini (Universita degli studi del Salento): What does it mean to edit
an Index scolastico-cartésien today?
9.50-10.40
Stefano Di Bella (Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa), Idolon naturae.
Seventeenth-century discussions on the concept of nature
10.40-10.55
Coffee break
10.55-13.00 Reading group (III): Vitalism vs. the Scientific
Revolution (1)
Convenors: Emanuela
Scribano, Stefano Di Bella
Texts: Cureau de La Chambre, Le Système de l'âme 1664, Livre
III ("Corpus des oeuvres de philosophie en langue française"); Cudworth's digression on 'plastick nature' in the True
Intellectual System
13.00-15.00
Lunch break
16.00-16.35: Rodolfo
Garau (Torino), Descartes’ reception of
the late-scholastic concept of conatus
16.35-16.50 Coffee break
16.50-17.25 Mihai-Dragoş Vadana (Bucharest), On the shivery separation between philosophy and theology: Descartes,
Wittich and Meijer
17.25-18.00 Andrea Sangiacomo (Groningen): Explaining superstition: Spinoza’s conatus
doctrine and its evolution between 1661 and 1670
19.00 Dinner
Monday, 8
July
9.30-10.05 Charles Wolfe (Ghent): Vitalism
between ontology and scientific pursuit-worthiness in the wake of the
Scientific Revolution
10.05-10.20
Coffee break
10.20-12.35 Reading group (IV): Vitalism vs. the Scientific
Revolution (2)
Convenors: Charles Wolfe, Sorana Corneanu
Texts:
Glisson, excerpt from De natura substantiae
energetica, 1672 (trans. G. Giglioni); excerpts from the Leibniz-Stahl
debate (Animadversiones circa Assertiones aliquas Theoriae Medicae Verae
clarii Stahlii … Or Negotium otiosum, seu Schiamachia, 1708) (trans. J.E.H.
Smith and F. Duchesneau); A. von Haller, A Dissertation on the Sensible
and Irritable Parts of Animals, 1752/1753; excerpts from Bordeu (1751),
Ménuret (1765) and Diderot (1769) on the ‘beeswarm’ (trans. C.T. Wolfe); Ménuret,
article “Oeconomie animale” from the Encyclopédie
(1765)
13.00-15.00
Lunch break
16.00-16.35 Ohad Nachtomy (Tel Aviv): “Ce qu’il vient
de dire de la double infinité n’est qu’une entrée dans mon système” – Leibniz’s Response to Pascal on the Nature of Living
Beings
16.35-16.50 Coffee break
16.50 -17.25 Lucian Petrescu (Ghent): Bartholomaeus Des Bosses’ Eucharistic Key
17.25-18.00 Sebastian Mateiescu (Bucharest): Francis
Bacon on the Stability and Transmutation of Species
19.00 Dinner
Tuesday, 9
July
9.15-9.50: Ian Lawson (Sydney): 'This Brittle Art': Margaret Cavendish and
the Microscope
9.50-10.25 Ofer Gal (Sydney): The Jesuits and the telescope
10.25-10.40
Coffee break
10.40-12.55 Reading group (V): Mechanical philosophy vs. the
spirit of nature: Henry More.
Convenors: Daniel
Garber, Stefano Di Bella, Grigore Vida
Texts:
Henry More, Immortality of the Soul, fragment
Kenelm Digby, Discourse on the powder of symathy, or The weapon salve, fragment
13.00-15.00
Lunch
16.00-16.35
Grigore Vida (New Europe College): Newton’s De Gravitatione and the Descartes-More
Correspondence
16.35-16.50 Coffee break
16.50-17.25 Monica Solomon (Notre Dame),
Newton, Huygens, and the (truly?) Rotating Globes
17.25-18.00 Claudia Dumitru (Bucharest): Robert Hooke's “Baconian Method”: Memory and Natural
History
19.00 Dinner
Wednesday,
10 July
9.30
Departure to Bucharest
This Seminar is supported by a grant of
the Romanian National Authority for Scientific Research, CNCS-UEFISCDI,
project number PN-II-ID-PCE-2011-3-0998: Models of Producing and
Disseminating Knowledge in Early Modern Europe: the Cartesian Framework.
