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A paper on the history of mechanics in the Middle Ages, co-authored by Henrik Lagerlund and Sylvain Roudaut, has been published in Aeon. The paper, which arose out of an ongoing edition of some of Blasius of Parma’s Questions of the Physics having to do with mechanical problems, presents the intricate history of this discipline during the Middle Ages and the evolution of its status.

One of the intriguing aspects of this story is that, despite laying the foundations of modern physics, and having envisioned quite varied practical applications of theoretical mechanics, most medieval thinkers named this discipline the ‘science of weights’ and did not suspect until the 16th century that they were doing what is called ‘mechanics’.

Two PhD positions in medieval and Renaissance logic and philosophy,
embedded in Graziana Ciola’s ERC Starting Grant Project, are open for application at Radboud University (Nijmegen). The deadline for applications is on the 14^th of May. More informations may be found here:

Position 1: https://www.ru.nl/en/working-at/job-opportunities/phd-candidate-in-the-history-of-philosophy-medieval-logic-and-semantics

Position 2: https://www.ru.nl/en/working-at/job-opportunities/phd-candidate-in-the-history-of-philosophy-medieval-and-renaissance-philosophy

Conference “The Mechanization of the Natural World 1300-1700”

25-28 May 2023, Stockholm University (Frescati Campus)

Mechanism or mechanical philosophy as defended by philosophers like Thomas Hobbes, René Descartes and Pierre Gassendi, offering a general picture of how the physical world is to be explained, is often seen as a replacement and rival to Aristotelianism. This general picture was, according to standard historical accounts, to dominate physical theory from the 1630’s up to the middle of the 18th century. There are two prominent aspects to the development of mechanical philosophy in the 17th century, namely the notion of matter, substrate or body underlying change and the laws of motion governing change. The mechanistic philosophers argued for a passive and material, atomist or corpuscular, view of matter and they aimed to formulate scientific laws that capture the efficient causal relations between these material parts.

Like many conceptual shifts in the history of philosophy, detachment from the Aristotelian framework was in many respects the final result of a gradual evolution in the way nature and natural processes were explained. The conference “The Mechanization of the Natural World 1300-1700”, hosted by Stockholm University, will explore the idea that mechanism or mechanical philosophy was not just an invention of the 17th century, but that its source can be traced to the mid-14th century. The early 14th century including William of Ockham and John Buridan are fairly well-studied, but the time period in the scholastic tradition between 1350 and 1600 is very little known and much work remains to be done on the development of new ideas and concepts during this period.

The conference will address how the gradual emergence of mechanical philosophy arose across the time period from the mid-1300 to the late-1600 out of the interactions between different themes like (1) the conception of causal powers, (2) new theories of matter and (3) change in the conception of causality and the rejection of final causes. The aim of the conference is to display the richness and unity of the period 1300–1700 in the light of what has come to be called mechanism or mechanical philosophy.

Possible topics include (but are not restricted to):
– The emergence of the concept of mechanism or mechanical philosophy
– The gradual integration of mechanics into the framework of Aristotelianism in the targeted period
– The epistemological roles of machines before the Scientific Revolution
– Changes in the definition of nature during the selected period
– Changes in the conception of causal powers
– Relations between causal powers and the laws of nature
– Evolutions of theories of motion
– The role of new theories of matter and quantity in the rise of mechanical philosophy
– Relations between Aristotelianism and corpuscular theories of matter
– Transformations of the concept of causality and explanation in the targeted period
– Evolution of theories of final cause

Invited speakers:
Zvi Biener (University of Cincinnati)
Deborah Brown (University of Queensland)
Helen Hattab (University of Houston) – keynote
Mattia Mantovani (KU Leuven)
Calvin Normore (UCLA)
Robert Pasnau (University of Colorado Boulder)
Dominik Perler (Humboldt-Universität Berlin) – tbc
Nicola Polloni (KU Leuven)
Stathis Psillos (University Athens) – keynote
Sophie Roux (ENS, Paris) – tbc

The conference will take place on 25–28 May 2023 at Stockholm University. Interested participants should send their proposal (short abstract and title) to [email protected] by 31 January 2023.
Priority will be given to proposals about the still understudied period 1400–1600.
Early career researchers and members of all underrepresented groups are especially encouraged to apply.
Acceptance of the proposals will be announced by 15 February 2023. Please contact the organizers for any query you might have.

Sylvain Roudaut and Irene Binini will run an online monthly seminar on the Oxford Calculators and their tradition this year. The seminar will cover the main figures of the Calculators’ circle as well as their predecessors and later followers. The objective of the seminar is to bridge the different fields connected to the Calculators’ tradition that have generally been studied apart from one another, like logic and natural philosophy, or ethics and theology, taking into account the many disciplines on which this tradition exerted some influence. More generally, the seminar aims at fostering the exchanges of discoveries, research and ideas on this circle and setting a collaborative network of researchers on these authors. If you are interesting in participating or attending the seminar, please contact the organizers. All are welcome!
More informations and detailed program available here.

The conference “Hylomorphism into Pieces: Elements, Atoms and Corpuscles in the Late Middle Ages”, hosted by KU Leuven and Stockholm University, will take place on April 7–8. The complete program can be found here. The conference will be online (Zoom). Please contact the organizers Nicola Polloni or Sylvain Roudaut to get the link if you are interested in attending the conference. All are welcome!

Henrik Lagerlund has recently published a volume on the history of skepticism in the Middle Ages. This volume is a special issue of Theoria and contains ten contributions ranging from the early Middle Ages to late scholasticism. The volume provides a general overview of the history of medieval skepticism by offering studies on the Arabic, Byzantine and Latin traditions.
More informations and table of content may be found here.

If you wish to attend the conference (which will be held via Zoom), please contact Henrik Lagerlund.

Call for Papers

Conference “Hylomorphism into Pieces: Elements, Atoms and Corpuscles in the Late Middle Ages (1400–1600)”

7-8 April 2022, hosted by KU Leuven & Stockholm University

Hylomorphism, the doctrine claiming that physical bodies are metaphysically composed of matter and form, was among the most successful, widespread, and influential theories in the later Middle Ages. Yet hylomorphism had its fair share of problems, which gradually arose during the later Middle Ages. In the 17^th century, it became common to claim that the principles of matter and form are unnecessary to explain natural processes and the structure of beings. Like many conceptual shifts in the history of philosophy, detachment from the Aristotelian framework was in many respects the final result of a gradual evolution in the way in which matter and form were conceived and applied as speculative devices. 
Important aspects of the strong oppositions to hylomorphism in 17^th-century philosophy have been object of recent studies. Nonetheless, the story of how this doctrine and its associated concepts proper to Aristotelianism gradually declined in the late Middle Ages still has to be properly assessed, especially in consideration of the fundamental theoretical developments of the 15^th and 16^th centuries. Organized by Sylvain Roudaut (Stockholm) and Nicola Polloni (Leuven), the conference “Hylomorphism into Pieces: Elements, Atoms and Corpuscles in the Late Middle Ages” aims to fill this gap by studying the major steps of this story from the late 14^th century to the late 16^th century.
The rejection of hylomorphism as explanatory device for the constitution of natural bodies was drastically facilitated by the influence of competing justifications of the internal structure of bodies. The rediscovery of Lucretius’ De natura rerum in the early 15^th century, together with new translations of other materials from Antiquity, generated new ideas about the structure of bodies and the type of explanation required for natural processes. But how were those new theories of matter received and integrated into the still dominant Aristotelian vocabulary of the time in the first place? To what extent did philosophers of the 15^th and 16^th centuries—including scholastic thinkers—try to reconcile hylomorphism and these new theories of matter?
Another crucial point of discussion is the theme of minima naturalia, which was originally discussed within the scholastic framework and in connection with problems proper to Aristotelian natural philosophy (such as the problems of spatial and temporal limits). But is it legitimate to regard late medieval theories of minima naturalia as corpuscularist or pre-corpuscularist conceptions of matter? To what extent did those theories pave the way for more radical corpuscularist conceptions of nature?
Finally, in Aristotelian natural philosophy, hylomorphism was accompanied by another theory of composition, taking bodies as elemental mixtures—those two types of composition being notoriously hard to reconcile. In what way did atomism affect the relation between those theories and benefitted the bottom-up approach typical of elemental composition? Similar questions can be asked about the notions of act and potency, which were increasingly detached from Aristotelian hylomorphism due to the development of corpuscularist accounts of motion.

With a hybrid format, Hylomorphism into Pieces will take place on 7-8 April 2022 in both Stockholm and Leuven, as well as in anyone’s laptop via Zoom. Interested participants should send their proposal (short abstract and title) to Sylvain Roudaut (sylvain.roudaut[at]hotmail.com) and Nicola Polloni (nicola.polloni[at]kuleuven.be) by 30 October 2021. Acceptance of the proposals will be announced by 15 November 2021. Please contact the organizers for any query you might have.

We are delighted to announce the list of confirmed speakers for our conference on final causation in the Middle Ages that will take place on May 20-22nd at Stockholm University:

Erik Åkerlund (The Newman Institute, Uppsala, Sweden)

Henrik Lagerlund (Stockholm University, Sweden)

Kamil Majcherek (University of Toronto, Canada)

Peter Myrdal (University of Turku, Finland)

Robert Pasnau (keynote speaker, University of Colorado Boulder, USA)

Jenny Pelletier (KU Leuven, Belgium)

Thomas Pink (King’s College London, UK)

Stephan Schmid (Universität Hamburg, Germany)

Cecilia Trifogli (University of Oxford, UK)

Valtteri Viljanen (University of Turku, Finland)