Call for applications: Princeton-Bucharest-Nuremberg Seminar in Early Modern Philosophy

The losers of the Scientific Revolution

Technical University Nuremberg (UTN), Department of Liberal Arts and Sciences

Nuremberg, 30 June-July 5, 2025

The Princeton-Bucharest-Nuremberg Seminar in Early Modern Philosophy is organized by Dana Jalobeanu (UTN/University of Bucharest), Daniel Garber (Princeton University) and Rodolfo Garau (University of Hamburg).

Invited speakers include: Roger Ariew (University of South Florida), Scott Mandelbrote (University of Cambridge), Gideon Manning (Mount Sinai College), Claudia Dumitru (Yale University), Oana Matei (Western University Vasile Goldis), Mihnea Dobre (University of Bucharest), Gyburg Ulhman (UTN). (More may be added.)

Early modern philosophy still has its winners and its losers. Even if historiographic categories have changed so many times, even if we do not speak about ‘The Scientific Revolution’ anymore, it is quite difficult to escape classifying early modern thought along the lines of ‘winners’ and ‘losers.’ After all, Descartes won his battle against the Aristotelians, mechanical philosophy defeated vitalism, Newton’s cosmology ‘won’ in front of persistent resistance from the proponents of ‘vortex theories’. Historians of the Royal Society still talk about Thomas Hobbes and Henry Power in terms of ‘losers’ with respect to their more successful (or better connected) colleagues, while Newton is depicted as the winner in the debates with Hooke and Leibniz.

Seventeenth century thought has all sorts of losers: Paracelsians and Galenists, Rosicrucians and die-hard Humanists, Aristotelians and Neoplatonists, vitalists, adepts of traditional medicine, Ptolemaic astrologers, chiliasts, proponents of natural magic etc. What can they teach us about the scientific revolution? This is what we are set to find out in a week-long, intensive research seminar.

This will be the 23^rd edition of the Princeton-Bucharest Seminar in Early Modern Philosophy, the international summer meeting of scholars interested in various aspects of early modern thought. The seminar has been held almost every summer since 2001, in various locations in Transylvania, in Bucharest and in Hamburg. Now, the seminar has moved to UTN Nuremberg. We will spend a week together, listening to talks and presentations, taking part in debates and reading groups, in a friendly and stimulating environment. The seminar is an intensive event. Participants are expected to arrive on Sunday (June 29) and leave no earlier than Saturday evening (July 4^th). There is no participation fee, but each participant will have to cover her/his accommodation and travel expenses. There will be some travel grants for students, covering the costs of accommodation in shared (double) rooms.

We seek talks and proposals for talks and reading groups bearing on figures of the seventeenth century which were classified by historians on the losing side of the Scientific Revolution. One could, for example, focus on some figure or some group of figures who aspired to revolutionize some area of natural philosophy, but didn’t succeed. Or one could write about a controversy between two figures, one of whom never made it into the canon of important authors in the period. Or one could write about some field, such as astrology, that has since disappeared. Please submit a proposal of roughly 250 words, together with a short CV, to Dana Jalobeanu by April 1, 2025 (dana.jalobeanu@gmail.com). If you want to apply for a travel grant, please enclose a letter of motivation. Notification of acceptance by April 5, 2025.

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