EMPHASIS Seminar

The purpose of EMPHASIS (Early Modern Philosophy and the Scientific Imagination) is to provide a London forum for scholars working in the history of philosophy, intellectual history and the history of science of Europe in the period 1400-1650. The term 'philosophy' is interpreted in its fullest Renaissance sense, and includes such themes as: Neoplatonism, scholasticism and late Aristotelian philosophy, Epicureanism, stoicism, scepticism, cosmological theories, the classification of the disciplines, encyclopaedism, Lullism, the art of memory, the philosophy of mathematics, theories of the soul, theories of language and signs, etc. All meetings: Saturdays, 2.00-4.00pm.

2007-2008 PROGRAMME

Saturday 6 October 2007: 2.00pm, Room NG14 (Senate House North Block)
Felicity Henderson (King's College, London)
'Scattered Remains: locating the books and papers of Robert Hooke'
Guest co-chair: Nadiya Midgley (Birkbeck)

Saturday 3 November 2007; 2.00pm, Room NG14 (Senate House North Block)
John A.W. Lock
'Practical applications of a mid-sixteenth-century English alchemist and metallurgist'
Guest co-chair: Jennifer Rampling (Cambridge, HPS)

Saturday 8 December 2007 ; 2.00pm, Room NG14 (Senate House North Block)
Peter Harrison (Manchester College, Oxford)
'What was philosophical about Natural Philosophy?'
Guest co-chair: Andrew Campbell (UCL)

Saturday 12 January 2008 ; 2.00pm, Room NG14 (Senate House North Block)
Stephen Johnston (Museum of the History of Science, Oxford)
'Mathematics, Causes and Magnetism: Thomas Digges on the variation of the compass'

Saturday 9 February 2008 ; 2.00pm, Room NG14 (Senate House North Block)
Susan James (Birkbeck, University of London)
"Democracy and the Good Life in Spinoza's Philosophy"

Saturday 8 March 2008 ; 2.00pm, Room STB8 (Stewart House, basement)
Pascal Brioist (CESR, Tours)
'The Geometry of the Bastion in Renaissance Fortifications '

Saturday 5 April 2008 ; 2.00pm, Room NG14 (Senate House North Block)
Andrew Campbell (University College, London)
'Paolo Antonio Foscarini: A Life Less Copernican'

Saturday 3 May 2008 ; 2.00pm, Room NG14 (Senate House North Block)
Christopher D Johnson (Harvard University)
'Breaking the Encyclopaedia: Francis Bacon's "Sylva Sylvarum" '

Saturday 7 June 2008 ; 2.00pm, Room NG16 (Senate House North Block)
Richard Coulton
''Gardening like Gentlemen: the writing and practice of horticulture in early-eighteenth-century London'

Saturday 14 June 2008; 2.00pm, Room ST273 (Stewart House, 2nd Floor)
Bruce T. Moran (University of Reno)
"Alchemy in the Margins: Private Practices and Alchemical Agendas in the Age of Reason -- the Case of Camillo Baldi'