Summer news from Neukölln

Within the last couple of weeks I’ve learned of a couple of new and notable Italian journals in our field. The first is Noctua, which focuses on “the history of philosophy from the ancient to the modern age,” but is particularly interested in things medieval, unsurprisingly since it seems to be the project of Stefano Caroti (Parma). It’s a biannual, open-access journal, and also produces an open-access book series, Quaderni di Noctua.

A second new Italian journal is Studi sull’Aristotelismo medievale, the scope of which runs from the sixth to the sixteenth century. It’s directed by Alessandro Conti (L’Aquila) and Cecilia Trifogli (Oxford). As with Noctua, the initial volumes are full of interesting material.

Thinking about these new journals reminds me of Jean-Luc Solère’s Table of Tables. This is an extremely useful online resource that I’ve probably mentioned before, but that deserves a reminder. It’s a regularly updated report of medieval papers that have come out over the last year in a long list of journals. In addition to being a great way to see quickly what’s new, it’s also useful simply as a list of journals that publish in medieval philosophy.

Something else pertaining to journals that some may find useful is an attempt to collect information about acceptance rate and response time (and other things) at a long list of English-language journals. See the announcement on the DailyNous. (This is, however, mainly useful for people who work in analytic philosophy, and has no specific connection to medieval philosophy.)

Two scholarships in France for doctoral students are being advertised, both focused on the relationship between law and theology in twelfth-century Europe. The dissertations can be written in French or English. The deadline is very soon (June 30, 2023). The positions begin in September 2023. Details here.

The Thomistic Institute is sponsoring a three-day conference this fall: Aquinas After 750 Years: Still the Common Doctor?” There’s an impressive list of participants. (Washington, DC, Sept. 14-16, 2023).

This November, there’s a conference in Brazil on Christine de Pizan and the Querelle de Femmes: Perspectives on the History of Philosophy (Nov. 20-22, 2023, Porto Alegre). The cfp deadline is August 15.

The Dante Society of America is sponsoring a session on the links between Dante and scholasticism, and especially “Islamo-Judaic Rationalism,” at next spring’s Renaissance Society of America (Chicago, March 21-23, 2024). The cfp deadline is the end of this week, June 30, 2023. Details here.

The Society for Medieval and Renaissance Philosophy is also sponsoring a series of sessions at that same RSA meeting in March 2024. They’ve put out a wide-open call for proposals, with a deadline of August 7, 2024. There seems to be nothing yet on their web page about this, but interested parties should contact Jason Aleksander.

Those whose interests run to the early modern period may like to know about a new website, run by Steven Nadler (Madison), that aims to serve something like the purpose of this blog, for that community. (It is, however, set up along different lines, and I will be interested to see whether it works better.)

Although I don’t usually mention the publication of books, my fondness for John Buridan compels me to announce with great pleasure that the long-awaited edition (with translation) of the Quaestiones de anima has finally been published by Springer. The editorial team is Klima–Sobol–Hartman–Zupko.

On the subject of books, Tobias Hoffmann (Sorbonne) and colleagues have been producing, for a few years now, an impressively comprehensive catalog of new books in the field of medieval philosophy. It’s available online, and well worth paging through.

Beginning next month, Princeton’s fabulous online Index of Medieval Art will be accessible without subscription. Even if you don’t do scholarly work on visual material, it’s a great way to quickly find images to enliven teaching, presentations and, come to think of it, even blogs. For instance, here’s the first-ever (?!) image to grace this particular blog:

https://theindex.princeton.edu/javax.faces.resource/GraphicImageView_getContentStream.action?ln=omnifaces.graphic&v=0&p=507B96AE-C72E-4305-8A86-E83C619AE2C0

Nope, that seems not to have worked. Oh well. No images today.

Postdocs and conferences: Spring 2023

The Human Abilities project in Berlin is advertising another postdoc, in medieval or early modern philosophy. The application deadline is April 16, 2023. Details here.

Kristell Trego (Fribourg) is advertising a one-year postdoc in medieval philosophy. The position requires fluency in French and a good knowledge of German and English. The application deadline is March 30, 2023. Details here.

The History of Philosophy Forum at Notre Dame is again advertising their Small Grants Program, to be used for travel and accommodation while doing research in South Bend. I fear the application deadline was yesterday, March 15, but perhaps a slight extension could be granted. (If not, well, make a plan to apply next year.)

The Vicious, Sinful, Antisocial Workshop runs, at the start of April, in hybrid format (April 3-4, 2023, Jyväskylä).

The annual Journée Incipit takes place in Paris on April 1, 2023. Details here.

Tobias Hoffmann (Sorbonne) has asked me to announce that the Conférences Pierre Abélard will be delivered in Paris on April 4, 5, 11, and 12 (2023), on the topic Construire la volonté. Yours truly will be giving these lectures, in French. (There is also talk of live-streaming the lectures.)

There’s a conference in Bonn this May on Scotism and Platonism: A New Appraisal (May 25-26, 2023).

Stockholm University is hosting a three-day conference in May on The Mechanization of the Natural World, 1300-1700 (May 25-28, 2023).

The Cohn Institute in Tel Aviv is sponsoring a hybrid workshop this June on Analogy and Justification in Premodern Science (June 21-22, 2023). The cfp deadline is March 31.

KU Leuven is holding a conference this fall on the Aristoteles Latinus: 1973-2023: Celebrating Half a Century of Aristoteles Latinus in Leuven” (October 25-27, 2023). The submission deadline was yesterday, March 15, but perhaps a grace period would be allowed.

I’ve recently discovered a popular essay by Yitzhak Melamed (Johns Hopkins), posted last fall, arguing that “it’s shocking that histories of medieval philosophy celebrate only Christian thinkers, ignoring Islamic and Jewish thought.” I suspect that this is a sentiment our field has already been persuaded of, for some years now, but this is perhaps a salutary reminder of something we need to practice in fact, not just endorse in principle.

News in the Field from October

King’s College London is advertising another lectureship (effectively, a permanent junior faculty position), “in Late Medieval / Early Modern Philosophy in any of the Christian, Islamic and Jewish traditions, especially in the History of Ethics and the Philosophy of Action.” The application deadline is November 15, 2022.

Next week, there’s a conference in Parma on Logic and Modalities in the Late Middle Ages. It will be held in person but also accessible on zoom (Oct. 17-19, 2022).

This year’s Journée thomiste will be on the subject Obéissance et autorité au Moyen Âge (Paris, December 3, 2022).

An international conference on the History of Logic in the Islamic World is planned for this March in Tehran, featuring a distinguished list of keynote speakers. The conference will be run in a hybrid format, partly in person and partly virtual (March 6-8, 2023). The cfp deadline has been extended until Oct. 31, 2022.

LMU Munich is organizing a conference for this coming May on Animals in Greek, Arabic, and Latin Philosophy (May 18-20, 2023). The cfp deadline is Oct. 31, 2022.

The Avicenna Study Group continues next fall: its fourth meeting will concern Avicenna’s “minor works” (Aix-en-Provence, Sept. 13-15, 2023).

The annual SIEPM colloquium for next year will be in Trento (Italy), on the subject Medieval Debates on Foreknowledge: Future Contingents, Prophecy, and Divination (Sept. 13-15, 2023; cfp deadline Jan. 31, 2023).

Alfred Freddoso continues to make progress on his complete online English translation of the Summa theologiae. He’s now approaching the end of the 2a2ae. This is by far the best complete translation available, and for anyone who’s still learning to read scholastic Latin, you really couldn’t do better than to work through this translation side by side with Aquinas’s Latin, available at the Corpus Thomisticum. Fred tells me that, if you are using this translation and find mistakes in it, he’d love to know about them.

End of Summer News

Next month, the Eleventh International Thomistic Congress will begin in Rome. For those who can’t make it there in person, the plenary talks will be live-streamed (September 19-24, 2022).

Next spring, also in Rome, a conference will be devoted to The Concept of ‘Ius’ in Thomas Aquinas (April 21-22, 2023; cfp deadline is December 15, 2022).

Another travel opportunity for Thomists is in Nigeria, next January: a conference on Thomas Aquinas: Medieval Thinker in the 21st Century Global Village (Ibadan, January 25-26, 2023; cfp deadline is October 31, 2022).

Oleg Bychkov (St. Bonaventure Univ.) has asked me to let readers know that the journal he edits—the long-standing, widely indexed peer-reviewed journal Cithara—is looking for articles for its fall issue. They publish essays in the “Judaeo-Christian tradition,” and so would be a good venue for many topics in our field.

Tobias Hoffmann (Paris) has been industriously cataloging. He’s updated his longstanding Scotus bibliography, which has changed its web address and is now here. He’s also pulled together–with the help of some students–an 82-page booklet containing information about books in medieval philosophy published over the last several years. That’s here.

With that list of new books in hand, you might like to know that Brill is advertising a 50% sale on (almost) all its books until the end of September. Offer here.

If you’ve got no money for buying books, you might like to know that Claus Andersen (South Bohemia) has gone to the trouble of hunting down all of the volumes of the Vatican edition of Scotus that are available at the Internet Archive, and provided a master-page linking to them all. (He’s found all but six of them.) The Internet Archive doesn’t let you download the documents as a pdf, but this is still quite a useful resource. (Thanks to Lee Faber at The Smithy for the pointer.)

In a post last month, I mentioned some good news regarding junior hires, and that brought me further good news: Brett Yardley has been appointed as an assistant professor at DeSales University (Pennsylvania), and Nathaniel Taylor has accepted a tenure-track position at The Catholic University of America.

In a recent post, Peter Adamson (Munich) talks to the APA about the academic scene in Europe.

The XVth International Congress of the SIEPM is finally about to begin—next week in Paris. As of yet the schedule of talks does not seem to be available, but it will presumably be posted here at some point. (I myself am sorry to be missing the big event. I’ll be home in Colorado, teaching our first week of classes.)

Fall 2021 News

The deadline for applying for the SIEPM One-to-One Stipend is September 30th, 2021. This stipend of 1,500 EUR supports junior researchers to visit and work with a senior researcher. See details here.

Monika Michałowska (Łódź) has organized a conference on The Oxford Calculators and Their Milieu on Ethics. It will be held online, March 10–11, 2022. The cfp deadline is October 30th, 2021. 

In addition to the big SMRP conference in early October, Notre Dame is hosting a conference next May 20-22, 2022 on medieval philosophy and theology. One way to get onto the program is to submit an abstract to the SMRP, before the end of November, 2021. Contact Fr. Philip-Neri Reese.

The SMRP awarded the 2021 Founder’s Prize for best paper by a younger scholar to André Martin (McGill University) for his paper “The Activity of the Soul and the Causality of its Object: Gonsalvus of Spain and the Influence of Peter John Olivi.”  Honorable mention went to Hashem Morvarid (University of Illinois at Chicago) for his paper “The Muʿtazila’s Arguments against Divine Command Theory.”

Peter Adamson has recently published an essay in the New Statesman, “Are Islamic Philosophers Critical of Authority?”

News for a Cold Planet

Globally, we’re in no position to object to cold weather but, still, it’s cold here! It’s also, unaccountably, been a long time since I posted anything, so here’s an attempt to catch up:

A online conference showcasing the work of female scholars working in medieval philosophy is being held on July 8-10, 2021. It’s being organized by folk at KU-Leuven. Details here. The cfp deadline is March 1.

The SIEPM has two colloquia tentatively scheduled for this summer, which may or may not happen in person (details here):

• June 7-9, 2021, in Ramat Gan, Israel, on “Dialectic in the Middle Ages: Between Debate and the Foundation of Science”;
• June 14-15, 2021, in Porto, on “Per cognitionem visualem. From the Visual Exegesis to the Visualization of Cognitive Processes in the Middle Ages and Beyond” (originally scheduled for 2020).

The International Congress of the SIEPM, which meets only once every five years, is scheduled for August 23-27, 2022, in Paris. Further details to come.

There’s an online summer school scheduled for July 5-9, 2021, organized out of Groningen, on Methodologies in the History of Philosophy. Applications are due by March 14.

Thomas Hibbs (University of Dallas) is directing a summer program for PhD students on Justice in Thomistic Ethics (July 18-24, 2021, in Washington DC). Application deadline March 31.

The American Philosophical Association has announced an annual Alvin Plantinga Prize, awarded for “original essays that engage philosophical issues about or in substantial ways related to theism.” The prize money is significant, but you must be an APA member. The deadline is March 30, 2021.

Scott Williams (UNC Asheville), in collaboration with Gordon Wilson, has created an extremely useful webpage on Henry of Ghent, complete with extensive links to online texts, an up-to-date account of where the critical edition stands, and a comprehensive bibliography.

There’s an interview with Ana Maria Mora Marquez (Gothenburg) at the blog 3:16.

I’ve got more material to share, but that’s all for this post. Will be back soon.

This Week’s News

• The Università della Svizzera Italiana (Lugano) is offering a new MA program, in English, focusing on a mix of analytic philosophy and the history of philosophy. Some quite distinguished scholars are involved, including, in our field, John Marenbon and Pasquale Porro. They expect to hold lectures on campus this fall. For application instructions go here. Some scholarship support is available and although some deadlines have passed, I am told interested students may be able to get an extension to that deadline.
• I’ve recently discovered the website of the Red Latinoamericana de Filosofía Medieval, which contains a great deal of useful information about their activities, members, et cetera.
• The University of South Bohemia, in beautiful České Budějovice, hopes to host a conference on February 11-13, 2021, on Cognitive Issues in the Long Scotist Tradition. The Cfp deadline is the end of July 2020. Let’s all hope the Scotists will be drinking their fill of Budweiser in February.
• Peter Adamson’s latest column in Philosophy Now argues for the value of studying minor figures in the history of philosophy.

Various Online Opportunities

• Jeffrey Brower (Purdue) is giving an online talk tomorrow (May 26, 2020) at 15:30 in Berlin, to the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science. For information about how to participate, contact twietecha@mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de.
• The Lumen Christi Institute is sponsoring an online panel discussion on Christians in Times of Catastrophe: Augustine’s City of God, featuring Jennifer Frey (Univ. South Carolina), Russell Hittinger (Lumen Christi Institute), and Michael Sherwin (Fribourg). That’s on June 9, 2020.
• Lydia Schumacher‘s (King’s College London) conference on thirteenth-century Franciscans has moved online, and will run over a series of 4 Fridays in late July and early August. For details see here.
• There’s a one-week online Latin paleography course being offered this July through the Central European University, for a reasonable tuition. It’s offered at both a beginning and an intermediate level, and there’s also two levels of Greek paleography available. July 6-10, 2020.
• Scott Williams’ newly-published collection of papers on Disability in Medieval Christian Philosophy and Theology (Routledge, 2020), is available as a free ebook until June 11th, here.
• There is — believe it or not — a Roger Bacon Research Society. Perhaps there has always been such a society, since 1292, and it has only recently emerged from its long occultation. At any rate, note that they sponsor an online reading group.
• Definitely not in occultation is Christina Van Dyke (Calvin College), who has been making philosophical videos since March for her online courses. The chef d’oeuvre is perhaps part two of the Julian of Norwich series. Take-home quote: “She doesn’t need to be a Zombie queen to be interesting.”

Upcoming Conferences and More

Here are various news items that I’ve gathered. This will probably be my last post until the end of the summer.

• This coming week, there’s an impressive conference in Poland on Mind and Body: Aspects of Medieval Natural Philosophy (Lodz, June 13-14, 2019).
• The 5th Rio Colloquium on Logic and Metaphysics in the Later Middle Ages is coming later this month, on Distinctions and Priorities in the Later Middle Ages (Rio de Janeiro, June 24-26, 2019). (Apparently there’s no information on the internet, but anyone interested should contact the organizer, Professor Rodrigo Guerizoli.)
• A conference on Naturaleza y Teoría Política en el Pensar Medieval y Renacentista will take place this summer at the Pontificia Universidad Católica Argentina (Buenos Aires, August 26-28, 2019)
• There’s an International Graduate Conference on the History of Philosophy scheduled for September on Platonism and Aristotelianism in the History of Philosophy (Pavia, Sept. 16-17, 2019). The cfp deadline is July 15.
• The University of Notre Dame is hosting a conference in September on Cusanus Today: Prospects for Philosophy, Theology, and Mysticism (Sept. 19-21, 2019)
• A conference with a focus on translation will take place next spring: Traduction… trahison? Textes, représentations, archéologie, autorité et mémoire de l’Antiquité à la Renaissance (Université de Picardie-Jules Verne, March 11-13, 2020)
• Another conference on the later medieval emergence of vernacular thought will take place later in the spring: El diálogo de las lenguas: la emergencia del pensamiento en vernáculo (siglos XIII-XVI) (Universidad Complutense de Madrid, May 11-13, 2020)
• I’ve stumbled upon an interesting attempt to collect information about medieval texts in translation, at HMAOT: Haut Moyen Age Occidental en Traduction. The focus is on the earlier Middle Ages, and runs well beyond philosophy.
• The Averroes Edition Project in Cologne is looking to fill a three-year PhD position in Arabic philosophy. Details here.
• There’s an interesting interview with Thomas Williams at 3:16. He talks there, among many other things, about his new translation of the Confessions.

• There’s a special issue of Theoria in the works, devoted to medieval skepticism. The deadline for submissions is September 1, 2019.
• The 24th Annual Colloquium of the SIEPM will take place in Varna (Bulgaria) this coming fall, on the subject of the Dionysian Traditions (September 9-11, 2019).
• The Aquinas and ‘the Arabs’ International Working Group is sponsoring a meeting in Pisa, June 18-21, 2019, on “Intellect, Experience and More.” Details here.
• There’s an interview with Peter Adamson (LMU Munich) at the What Is It Like … series.
• The Albert the Great Center is holding a week-long summer theology program on St. Paul’s epistle to the Galatians, drawing on Aquinas’s commentary. Details here (Wausau, Wisconsin, Aug. 12-16, 2019).
• The University of Pennsylvania libraries are advertising one-month visiting research fellowships for 2019-2020, aimed at their large collection of premodern manuscripts. The application deadline is May 15, 2019. Information here.
• The Society for Medieval and Renaissance Philosophy is taking submissions for its annual Founders’ Prize, for the best paper in the field by an emerging scholar. The deadline is May 1, 2019. Details here.
• I’m sorry to report that Loome Theological Books, in Stillwater, Minnesota, formerly the world’s greatest bookstore for medieval philosophy, has gone out of business.