Sylvain Roudaut

Irene Binini and I, together with other colleagues including Elżbieta Jung, Monika Michałowska and Robert Podkoński will run a seminar next year on the Oxford Calculators’ tradition, broadly understood. The highly sophisticated and technical character of the Calculators’ works, the great number of thinkers connected to this trend as well as the variety of topics they covered in their works make it very difficult for isolated researchers to achieve a full understanding of this tradition. This is why we came up with the idea of organizing a seminar bringing together scholars interested in the different aspects of the Calculators’ tradition, aiming at fostering the exchanges of results, data of research and ideas on this school and, more generally, paving the way for a collaborative network on these authors. Because of the geographical distance between the researchers interested in this tradition, the plan is organize an online seminar that will start in September, with meetings taking place every 2 or 3 weeks.

Although the main point of this seminar would be to bridge fields of research that specialists of the Calculators have tended to study separately, like logic/semantics and natural philosophy, ethics and theology, these meetings will be open to anyone interested either in the Calculators themselves, their successors and their influence or their historical opponents and competing schools. We hope that this seminar will help better understand this fascinating and yet very complex philosophical “school” and its influence on the history of late medieval thought.

If you are interested in either attending or presenting a paper, please contact me or Irene. All are welcome: the more the merrier!

Sylvain

I’m very happy to announce the publication of this book on the quantification of forms in the Middle Ages. The book tells the story of how philosophers from the 13th century onward were gradually led to conceptualize qualitative properties in quantitative terms. This theme has a long and complex history but the terminus a quo of the book is the problem over the “intensity of forms”, as it was intensely debated in the mid-13th century. It is then shown how the interactions between different sciences (natural philosophy, metaohysics, theology, medicine and mathematics) eventually resulted in quantification and measurement techniques that were applied to a broad range of topics, eventually reaching their broadest extension with the controversies over the perfection of species from the mid-14th century onward.

One of the main theses of the book is that the evolution of the problem de intensione formarum – and, thus, the tendency to quantify forms (substantial forms as well as accidental ones) – cannot be properly understood without taking into account its connections with other ‘problems of forms’ (the debate over the plurality of forms, the forma fluens/fluxus formae problem, the status of forms as universals).

The book is to a large extent a revised version of my PhD dissertation (in French), which explains that I didn’t have the courage to re-write the whole thing in English. However, the terminus ad quem is only 1370 — I still plan to write chapter 2 of this story, which continued until the early modern period, and I’ll do that in English this time! Informations and table of contents may be found here: https://brill.com/view/title/61204.

Sylvain

We are pleased to announce that, as part of our project on the mechanization of philosophy in the late Middle Ages, we are currently working on a volume about the medieval ontology of artifacts. The volume, which will include contributions on theories of artifacts ranging from the early Middle Ages to the early modern period, will be published as a special issue of the journal Philosophies. The aim of this volume is to provide a comprehensive view of medieval reflections on the status of artifacts not only in medieval Latin philosophy but also in the Arabic/Islamic, Jewish and Byzantine traditions. We hope that the different papers composing the volume will make it possible to better appreciate how the divide between art and nature evolved in the Middle Ages. If anyone works on the subject and is interested in contributing to the volume, please feel free to contact us. More informations and a detailed blurb can be found here.