Life and Death in Early Modern Philosophy

Conference of the European Society for Early Modern Philosophy 

and The British Society for the History of Philosophy

In association with the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities, KCL and the Wellcome Trust

Thursday 14th April 2016

The Great Hall, King’s College London, Strand, London WC2R 2LS

2.30-4.0: Tea and Registration in the Foyer of the Great Hall.

4.0 – 4.30: Susan James, Welcome and Introduction

4.30- 6.0: Plenary Lecture: Michael Moriarty, The thought of death changes all our ideas and condemns our plans.


Friday 15th April 2016
Birkbeck College, Clore Management Centre, Torrington Square, London WC1E 7JL.

9.30am – 11am:  Plenary Lecture: Ursula Renz, Our Consciousness of Being Alive as a Source of Knowledge.

11.15am – 12.45pm:
Session 1:
Meghan Robison, But a Movement of Limbs: On the Movement of life in Hobbes’ Leviathan.
Barnaby Hutchins, Descartes’s ‘Vitalism’ .

Session 2:
Steph Marston, Affects and Effects: Spinoza on Life.
Julie Klein, Life and Death in Spinoza: Power and Reconfiguration.

Session 3:
John Callanan, The Historical Context of Kant’s Opposition to Suicide.
Jonas Jervell Indregard, Kant on Beauty and the Promotion of Life.

LUNCH

Coinciding with meeting of agreed and likely contributors to research network.

2pm – 3.30pm:
Plenary Lecture: Martine Pécharman, The Moral Import of Afterlife Arguments in Pascal and Locke.

3.45pm – 5.15pm:
Session 1:
Hannah Laurens, An Eternal Part of the Body? Spinoza on Human Existence Beyond Life and Death.
Filip Buyse, Spinoza on conatus, inertia and the impossibility of self-destruction.

Session 2:
Andreas Scheib, Johannes Clauberg and the Development of Anthropology after Descartes.
Andrea Strazzoni, Particles, Medicaments and Method. The Medical Cartesianism of Henricius Regius.

Session 3:
Sarah Tropper, ‘When the Manner of Death Disagrees with the Status of Life. The Intricate Question of Suicide in Early Modern Philosophy.
Teresa Tato Lima, Suicide and Hume’s Perspective about Human Life.

5.30pm – 7pm:
Plenary Lecture: Mariafranca Spallanzani, ‘Tota philosophorum vita commentatio mortis est’. Death of philosophers.


Saturday 16th April 2016
Birkbeck College, Clore Management Centre, Torrington Square, London WC1E 7JL.

9.30am – 11am:

Session 1:
Kate Abramson, Living well, well-being and ethical normativity in Hume’s ethics.
Giuliana di Biase, Human’s life as a “state of mediocrity” in John Locke’s Essay and in his other works.
Session 2:
Dolores Iorizzo, Francis Bacon’s Natural and Experimental History of Life and Death (1623): A Lacuna in Accounts of the Scientific Revolution.
Gianni Paganini, Life, Mind and Body. Campanella and Descartes’ Connections.

Session 3:
Oliver Istvan Toth, Do we really need to die? Spinoza on the Necessity of Death in the Ethics.
Piet Steenbakkers, Living Well, Dying Well: Life and Death in Spinoza’s Philosophy and Biography.

11.15am – 12.45pm:
Plenary Lecture: Charles Wolfe, How I learned to love Vitalism.

LUNCH

2pm – 3.30pm:
Session 1:
Sean Winkler, The Persistence of Identity in Spinoza’s Account of Individuals.
Mogens Laerke, The Living God. On Spinoza’s Hebrew Grammar and Cogitata Metaphysica II,6.
Session 2:
Piero Schiavo, Controlling Death. Democritus and the myth of a death en philosophe.
Michael Jaworzyn, Clauberg, Geulincx, and philosophy as meditatio mortis after Descartes.

Session 3:
Matteo Favaretti Camposampiero, The Ban of Death: Leibniz’s Scandalous Immortalism.
Audrey Borowski, Leibniz’s natural Mechanism. Life and Death Revisited.

3.45pm – 4.15pm: Meetings of learned societies.

4.15pm – 5.45pm: Plenary Lecture: Lisa Shapiro, Learning to Live a Fully Human Life.

5.45 – 6.0: Conclusion and Farewell

Registration is now open for this conference at: https://www2.bbk.ac.uk/philosophy/

Montaigne in Early Modern England and Scotland

Dates: Fri.-Sat. 6-7 Nov. 2015

Confirmed speakers:

Warren Boutcher (Queen Mary)
Will Hamlin (Washington State)
Katie Murphy (Oxford)
John O’Brien (Durham)
Richard Scholar (Oxford)
David Louis Sedley (Haverford)

The Institute of Medieval and Early Modern Studies (IMEMS) at Durham University invites proposals for 20-minute papers on any aspect of the reception of Montaigne’s Essais in England and the larger Anglophone world, including Ireland, Scotland, and North America, during the first two hundred years following their initial publication in French. Any approach to the study of Montaigne’s influence is welcome, including literary criticism, philosophy, theology, psychology, history of science, and history of the book. Authors to consider range from Bacon and Hobbes up to Locke and Hume, and include literary figures, as well, such as Florio, Cornwallis, Daniel, Shakespeare, Jonson, Burton, Browne, Dryden, Johnson, Pope, Swift, and Sterne. Early career academics and postgraduates are encouraged to apply, as well as more established scholars. For consideration, please send a title, an abstract of no more than 200 words, and a one-page CV to montaigneinearlymodernengland@gmail.com no later than 1 August 2015.

http://www.dur.ac.uk/imems

Enlightenment senses? Eighteenth-Century Sensorium(s), Theory and Experience

June 13th-14th 2014, King’s College London

Centre for Enlightenment Studies at King’s

The senses mattered a great deal in the eighteenth-century. Sensibility, sympathy, and Lockean subject theory were all overwhelming concerned with the senses, and ‘The Enlightenment’ is often seen as a crucial breaking point in how we have historically understood and used our senses. Historical narratives that stress the increased value placed on the rationality of vision and the primacy of touch over the eighteenth-century - gaining prominence over the sense of smell as a method of evaluation - are much contested today. Scholars such as Foucault, Horkheimer and Adorno, and Lucien Febvre have emphasized the manifold changes in the way the senses were thought about and used during the Enlightenment. At a broader level Mark Smith has stated that

‘In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the senses informed the emergence of social classes, race and gender conventions, industrialization, urbanization, colonialism, imperialism, nationalism, ideas concerning selfhood and “other,” to list the most obvious developments typically associated with the “modern” era’. (Mark Smith, Sensing The Past, Berg, 2007, p.1)

This two-day conference aims to bring together those concerned with the social and cultural history of the senses in the period from 1650-1790 as well as those working on literary or intellectual histories of the senses in an attempt to encourage a more active dialogue between these areas. The conference aims to link ‘sensory histories’, concerned with embodied sensory experience and representation, with ‘histories of the senses’ in which the intellectual and medical understandings of the senses are foregrounded. Papers are invited that reflect on the wide variety of issues described above and their connections with notions of ‘Enlightenment’. We particularly welcome papers that seek to critique the utility of the ‘Enlightenment’ for the understanding of the senses in the seventeenth and eighteenth-centuries.

Proposals are invited from across disciplines for papers of 20 minutes in length. Proposals of up to 300 words should be sent to enlightenmentsenses@kcl.ac.uk with a brief biography attached. The deadline for proposals is 08/03/2014.

The conference is being organised by William Tullett, Alice Marples & Marlee Newman.

http://enlightenmentsenses.wordpress.com