Keynote speakers: Daniel Garber (Princeton University), Rodolfo Garau (Ca’ Foscari University, Venice)

Venue: ICUB Humanities, 1 Dimitrie Brandza St., 060102, Bucharest, Romania.

It has been a long tradition that early career researchers and graduate students take part in the meetings of the Princeton-Bucharest Seminar in Early Modern Philosophy. To preserve this tradition, the Princeton-Bucharest Seminar has joined forces with the Bucharest Graduate Conference in Early Modern Philosophy, which has just reached its 9th edition! The Graduate Conference will take place on October 15-16, right after the Princeton Bucharest Seminar. Graduate students of both Master’s and PhD levels are encouraged to submit abstracts on any topic related to early modern philosophy by the 1^st of September 2022. Abstracts should not exceed 800 words. Each participant will be given 20 minutes to present their paper and another 20 minutes for a Q&A session (40 mins total). The program committee will notify authors of its decision by the 5^th of September.

Although we aim to organize the conference in person, a hybrid or an entirely online format remains a possibility, depending on the availability of the speakers to present in person. We will discuss presentation details with each speaker individually.

There is no participation fee. However, we are unable to cover any costs related to travel, accommodation etc.

Please send your abstracts and any other inquiries to bucharestgradconf@gmail.com

This event is organized as part of the Research Project ‘Recipes, Technologies and Experiments: Enactment and the Emergence of Modern Science’, PN-III-P4-ID-PCE-2020-0251. Participants are very welcome to attend both the Seminar (October 14-15) and the Graduate Conference (October 15-16). Stay tuned for more updates!

Update: Consult the conference programme!

The Princeton-Bucharest Conference in Early Modern Philosophy, in Bucharest, 14-15 October 2022.

Organized by Dana Jalobeanu and Oana Matei at the Research Institute of the University of Bucharest (ICUB-Humanities)

Invited speakers: Daniel Garber, Jennifer Rampling, Hiro Hirai, Vlad Alexandrescu

Speakers: Raffaella Derosa, Christoffer Basse Eriksen, Benjamin Goldberg, Claire Crignon, Oana Matei, Dana Jalobeanu

This will be an in-person meeting, at the ICUB-Humanities (Dimitrie Brandza str. 1, Bucharest, Romania). We aim to bring together historical and philosophical perspectives upon the origins of early modern experiments and the emergence of experimental philosophy.

For the conference programme click here.

ICUB-HUmanities, University of Bucharest.

First international colloquium of the research project Recipes, Technologies, Experiments: Enactment and the Emergence of Modern Science (PN-III-P4-ID-PCE-2020-0251). Online

18.11.2021

19:00- 19:20 Welcome Address

19:20-20:00 Arianna Borrelli (Leuphana University of Lünenburg) -Recipes as Tools for Concept Formation in the Work of Giovan Battista Della Porta

20:00-20:40 Dana Jalobeanu (University of Bucharest) – The “Missing Results” of Bacon’s Tables: Or Reading the Novum Organum in Context

19.11.2021

16:00-16:40 Stephen Clucas (Birkbeck University of London) – Going with the Alchemical Flow: Schematizing Laboratory Technique in the Late Sixteenth Century

16:40-17:20 Georgiana Hedesan (University of Oxford) – Between Incomplete and Philosophical Recipes: Deciphering Van Helmont’s Universal Medicines

17:20-18:00 Alexandru Liciu (University of Cambridge) – John Woodward’s “Test” of Observation and the Issue of Civil History

18:00-18:20 Break

18:20-19:00 Laura Georgescu (University of Groningen) – Philosophising with Objects: The Role of Artefacts in Digby’s Treatise on Body

19:00-19:40 Doina-Cristina Rusu (University of Groningen) – Distillations, Spirits, and Essences. Experimentation and Matter Theory in the Early Modern Period

19:40-20:20 Mihnea Dobre (University of Bucharest) – Constructing Experiments with Glass Drops in Jacques Rohault’s Natural Philosophy

26.11.2021

16:00-16:40 Florike Egmond (University of Leiden) – Cultivating’ the Sea and Reading its Signs: Marine Expertise of the 16th-Century North Sea

16:40-17:20 Benjamin Goldberg (University of Florida) – Concepts of Experience in Royalist Recipe Collections

17:20-17:40 Break

17:40-18-20 Iordan Avramov (Bulgarian Academy of Sciences) – Communicating Recipes and Experiments via Letters at the Early Royal Society of London

18:20-19:00 Oana Matei  (University of Bucharest, University of Vasile Goldis, Arad)- Building an Early Modern Science of Vegetation: Nehemiah Grew’s Inquiries into the “Anatomy of Plants”

In this seminar, Dana Jalobeanu invited us to explore one of  Francis Bacon’s lesser known texts, the Historia et inquisitio de animato et inanimato. Starting from the conditions for the apparition of animated bodies, („an enclosed spirit, heat attenuating and dilating the spirit, soft and sticky matter, and a matrix closed up for the right length of time”), Dana started an investigation into the proper place of the Historia et inquisitio in the broader context of Bacon’s corpus of texts, suggesting that it could provide a roadmap to Bacon’s unwritten 4th part of the Great Instauration.

Dana emphasized that, in this project of a systematic inquiry into the domain of animated matter, we find a convoluted, but technical, terminology (inquisitio as a more advanced part of inquiry than the mere historia; „inquisitio inartificialis et in confuso” vs. „inquisitio artificialis”). An important example of such a technical concept – on which we spent some time – are the „canones mobiles”,  i.e. flexible rules and generalizations that are evolving alongside the process of discovery (and which, as it was suggested by the audience, come from a medical tradition, for which the „canones” represent a series of rules agreed upon by the greatest physicians). The use of canones mobiles is relatively widespread in Bacon’s programme (for instance, in the De vijs mortis we are presented with such a canon: „anything that can be constantly fed, and by feeding be wholly restored, is, like the vestal flame, potentially everlasting”). The terminological discussion led to the question of how are such concepts to be organized and what can this tell us about Bacon’s programme of an experimental natural philosophy. Thus, Dana argued that we should distinguish between ”mother-histories” (the first level of inquiry) and the more advanced inquisitio (exploratory experimentation that can be done at different levels of inquiry). We also examined the theory of matter that underpins the discussion on vivification. For Bacon, „vivification” (the switch from inanimate to animate matter) occurs when the „spirits” that make up the matter are disposed in a specific structure (they are „branched”). What we obtain from this is a continuous taxonomy of the animated bodies, since this account also allows for degrees (some things are more „animated” than others). We took the discussion on step further and asked how is it possible for the artificer to produce artificial life in the laboratory. Dana showed that there are two possibilities on the table (controlling the process of „putrefaction” vs. controlling the matter), and then proposed to look closer at some steps towards the production of artificial life, such as the processes of concoction or of enclosed distillation.

The speaker also received a good number of relevant questions from the audience, such as: what is, in this context, the difference between imitating and perfecting nature? Is the whole universe animated, for Bacon? Can we divide the spirits? Can we produce better animals? What role do limit-cases play in the context of vivification (animals that live in extreme environments, deep ground that ceases to be fertile etc.)? Which sort of things can be vivified and which ultimately can not? (Can we vivify gold? How about Paracelsus’s homunculus? Why shouldn’t we try to reproduce it?) Is vivification related to density and rarity?

In this seminar, Oana Matei presented her work-in-progress related to the way in which Nehemiah Grew planned to build a science of vegetation, with a focus of his “The Anatomy of Plants”. Oana advanced her provisional thesis that the aim of Grew’s book is to organize different processes of nature into theoretical layers, i.e. in a science of vegetation. Thus, we found out that, for, Grew, “digestion is instrumental to fermentation”, while “fermentation is subservient to vegetation”. These notions, alongside some more details on the way that Grew speaks of generation and motion, gave rise to a discussion on the proper terms that we should use in relation to Grew. Some of us tended to see him as a serious experimentalist (indicating possible connection with Robert Hooke or the medical circle to which Grew belonged), while others emphasized  the vitalistic tone of some of his phrases, or even the bits that rather belong to a mechanical philosophy.

In this context, a number of interesting questions were put on the table. Are some of Grew’s notions of Helmontian influence? In which sense does Grew use the notion of „principles” (Nitrous, Acid, Alkaline, Marine, but he also claims that the atoms are „principles”)? Are they more than mere posits? Why did Grew write an anatomy of plants? To which theoretical level does the anatomy belong? Is Grew part of a larger discussion about the merits of the Ancients vs. the merits of the moderns? (is he engaging with the Hippocratic corpus on generation?). How does Grew reconciliate a physics of processes with geometrical observations (that you only see in an instance)? Is Grew involved in a project of creating artificial life? (and how radical was this?). What is, for him, the difference between biological and non-biological entities? How is Grew’s embryology looking like (how do the structures of pre-established order get intro the seed? Are they there to begin with?).