Blog

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

This Thursday and Friday, March 23 and 24, there will be an online conference called “What Can the Will Do?”. The topic is the will, from a plethora of perspectives, and the time frame is the 13th to the 16th centuries.

For details, program and registration, go here.

In the last session, on Friday at 5 pm, one of the participants of this project, Erik Åkerlund, will give a presentation on “Powers and Limitations of Civil Governance in Suárez”.

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.

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

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.

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

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