I began with a degree in Theoretical Physics (at Babes Bolyai University, Cluj) and then moved to Philosophy, doing first a BA at the UBB Cluj, then a PhD at the University of Bucharest. During my PhD I spent a year at Balliol College, Oxford (1997-1998) on a Horia Georgescu/Chevening Scholarship. After defending my PhD, in 2000, I had a number of post-doctoral fellowships and visiting scholarships at the New Europe College, Bucharest, Warburg Institute, University of London, Princeton University, Max Planck Institute for History of Science, Berlin, LMU, Munich and HIAS, Hamburg.

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. Here are some of these topics:

• How metaphysical debates relating to the problem of individuation have shaped a new conception of physical bodies, subject to the laws of nature (see here and here for papers on this topic)
• The problem of the ‘orbs of virtue,’ i.e., the model of body-body interaction that preceded (and was replaced by) the mechanical model of collisions (See here and here for two papers on this topic)
• The unexpected ways in which a traditional discipline of the mind (the ‘medicine of the mind’) shaped the early stages of experimental philosophy in the first part of the seventeenth-century (see here and here)
• The ways in which early modern forms of mixed-mathematics provided a pattern for Bacon’s natural and experimental history (and the subsequent ‘advancement of learning’) (see here, and here)
• The formation of an early modern experimental vocabulary that cuts across doctrinary divisions (of which some samples can be found here and here).
• The interplay between experimentation, new instrumental techniques and the conceptualization of a ‘corrective epistemology’ in the seventeenth century (see and example here)
• The nature and functions of the ‘Baconian science’ as a model for aggregating research communities in the second part of the seventeenth century

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.

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.

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.

Since 2009 I teach in the Department of Theoretical Philosophy, Faculty of Philosophy, University of Bucharest. During these years I have proposed 8 new courses, of which 4 have become part of the regular curriculum (Natural philosophy and the emergence of science (BA course); The art of questioning (MA course), Science and the pseudo-sciences (MA course), Theories of matter in the seventeenth century (MA course)) and the others are offered on a yearly basis, as optional courses (History of Cosmology from Plato to Einstein, Epicureism and Modernity (jointly taught with a classicist, Andrei Cornea, and with my fellow early modern scholar, Grigore Vida), Francis Bacon: How to read the Novum Organum.