I am Professor of Philosophy at the University of Bucharest, Department of Theoretical Philosophy. I teach early modern philosophy and history (and philosophy) of science. In between 2014 and 2024 I was director of the Humanities Division of the Research Institute of the University of Bucharest. From 2025 I have also joined the Department of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences at the University of Technology, Nuremberg, as Professor of Early Modern Philosophy.

I am particularly interested in the emergence of early modern experimental philosophy and its interplay with the ‘Baconian science’. My AOS is an interdisciplinary area of research, something I call the ‘early modern philosophy and the sciences’, i.e., the various disciplines engaged in knowledge-production in a period that begun at the end of the sixteenth-century and lasted until the end of the seventeenth-century. My research is problem-driven; during the past two decades I worked in various topics that have in common the fact that they exploit methods coming from history and philosophy of science and put them in the service of the history of philosophy.

More about me here.

Research projects and topics

My current research bears on the early modern philosophy of experiment, i.e., the corpus of philosophical reflections and experimental ‘methodologies’ elaborated in the second part of the seventeenth century by natural philosophers in England and France, under the influence of Francis Bacon. I am particularly interested in forms of blending Baconianism and Cartesianism in the works of Pierre Borel, Henry Power and Robert Hooke. I believe that my research opens a new way to address the diffusion of Baconianism across Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth century, one that does not have to separate between ‘science’ and ‘ideology,’ ‘internalism’ and ‘externalism,’ or ‘High’ and ‘Low’ Baconianism. More on my research projects here.

PhD positions and supervision

If you want to work with me, I am enrolling PhD students in both the University of Bucharest and University of Technology Nuremberg. See here for a newly advertised PhD position at UTN.

I am looking for students interested in Francis Bacon and the reception of Baconianism in Europe. I am also looking for students interested in bridging the gap between Renaissance studies and Early Modern Philosophy. My research is interdisciplinary and problem-oriented and I would be happy to collaborate with both historians of philosophy and historians of science.

My area of competence include history of philosophy in the Renaissance & early modernity, history of cosmology, but also Roman Stoicism and the reception of Stoicism in the Renaissance and early modern philosophy. I have recently finished a book on Seneca’s Philosophical Theatre which provides a guide and interpretation of Seneca’s Letters to Lucilius. I am currently working on a book called The Hunt of Pan: Francis Bacon’s art of experimentation and the invention of science.

Institutional construction

In addition to doing research, I like to build institutions. I am the co-founder of the Princeton Bucharest Seminar in Early Modern Philosophy and the co-founder and editor of the Journal of Early Modern Studies. Through the grants I held during the past two decades (see the list below) I have established a good research group in early modern studies at the University of Bucharest, and, since 2014, I helped building the first Institute of Research of the University of Bucharest, as a Director of the Humanities Division.

I am also editing and translating Francis Bacon’s works as the general editor of the first Romanian edition of Bacon’s philosophical works and as a member of The Oxford Francis Bacon project (and the coordinator of volume XX of the OFB edition).

My work in early modern philosophy and the sciences also involved editing volumes for students and the future generations; such as the recent Encyclopedia of Early Modern Philosophy and the Sciences (Springer, 2022), which I co-edited with Charles Wolfe; and the Cambridge History of Philosophy of the Scientific Revolution, co-edited with David Marshall Miller (CUP, 2022).

Service to the profession: since 2018 I am president elect, then full president of the European Society for History of Science; I was in the board of HOPOS, and in between 2011 and 2022 I was the general secretary of the ISIH; I am the executive editor of Society and Politics, and editor for the early modern philosophy at Perspectives on Science (since 2021). I am in the editorial board of Intellectual History Review (since 2011); and of the editorial boards of BSPS Open and Birkhauser’s collection, Frontiers of science.