Marcia Colish (1937-2024)

I am sorry to report that Marcia Colish has died after major cardiac surgery at the Yale New Haven Hospital. She taught in the history department for nearly 40 years at Oberlin College, in Ohio, and was for the last several decades affiliated with Yale University. Her many important writings include a two-volume study of the reception of Stoicism in the early Middle Ages (Brill 1985) and another two-volume study of Peter Lombard (Brill 1994).

Spring Happenings

I trust that everyone celebrated, in their own fashion, the 750th anniversary of Thomas Aquinas’s death this past week. (My own celebrations took place in Leuven.) For anyone uninspired by that anniversary, we now have the 750th anniversary of the 1277 condemnations to look forward to in three years’ time.

Here’s some information about what’s going on in the field. Many of the deadlines are for this Friday, March 15.

Notre Dame’s History of Philosophy Forum is advertising a three-year postdoc, open to any area in the history of philosophy. The application deadline is March 25, 2024. Details here.

That same Notre Dame program is advertising two funding opportunities to spend limited periods of time conducting research in South Bend. The application deadlines are March 15, 2024. Details here.

The SIEPM is advertising various prizes and funding opportunities this spring, including the Jacqueline Hamesse Award for the best paper by a younger scholar, and the one-to-one stipend for junior scholars seeking to spend time working with a senior scholar in the field.

Funded PhD positions in medieval studies are available through a program jointly sponsored by King’s College London and Kent University, thanks to a grant from the Leverhulme Trust. See details here. Students interested in applying in philosophy should contact Dr. Zita Toth (KCL).

There’s also the opportunity for PhD funding in Helsinki, working with Filipe Pereira da Silva on the topic of ancient sources of matter in late medieval commentaries on Aristotle. The application deadline is this week: March 15, 2024. Details here.

The 34th meeting of the Medieval Philosophy Network in the U.K. will take place on March 19th, 2024 in London.

The annual Journée Incipit is scheduled for March 23rd, 2024, in Paris. The keynote lecture will be given by Wouter Goris (Bonn).

In Naples next month there’s a three-day conference on San Tommaso d’Aquino, uomo del Mediterraneo, uomo del dialogo (April 25-27, 2024).

There’s a week-long summer seminar in Germany this summer on thirteenth-century debates on human freedom. The program is open to advanced undergraduates, graduate students and postdocs (July 3-7, 2024, Regensburg). Some funding is available. Despite what the website says, I have it on good authority that the correct application deadline is this week: March 15.

The Thomistic Institute (Washington DC) is sponsoring a week-long colloquium for graduate students this summer on Contemporary Thomistic Christology (July 29-Aug 3, 2024, Washington). Funding is available. The application deadline is this week: March 15.

There’s a conference in Paris in June to celebrate the joint 750th anniversaries of the death of Aquinas and Bonaventure (June 13-14, 2024). Details at Pariscope médiéval.

The University of Lisbon, in collaboration with the Society for the European History of Ideas, is organizing its own conference in October to celebrate the Aquinas-Bonaventure anniversaries (October 9-11, 2024, Lisbon). Cfp deadline: March 28, 2024. [Now extended to April 28th.] See details here.

Durham University is advertising two online, two-week intensive courses in Latin and early-modern English paleography. Details here.

A couple of significant European professorships in medieval philosophy have been filled recently. In Leuven, Jenny Pelletier has been appointed to a permanent research professorship. Meanwhile, Nicola Polloni has been appointed to a similar position in Messina.

Help wanted. Some time ago, I announced an initiative to start an open-access series of editions and translations in medieval philosophy. Through the hard work of many, this initiative—the Medieval Text Consortium—is now coming close to seeing the appearance of its first volume, with more in the works. We would be glad to receive proposals for future volumes. At the moment, though, we are looking for someone with skills in LaTeX typesetting (or at a minimum an enthusiasm to learn), who could help us bring these volumes into print. Some compensation is available. Anyone interested in being involved in the project should contact me directly.

News for January 2024

Lumen Christi is offering a wide range of summer seminars, including seminars on eudaimonia (in Philadelphia, with Martin Seligman, Candace Vogler and others) and on Aquinas on Free Choice (in Chicago, with Stephen Brock). The seminars are aimed at PhD students. Application deadlines are this week — February 2 — and the funding is very generous. Details here.

The University of Notre Dame is advertising a summer school for graduate students–in Rome!–on premodern philosophy and science, on the topic Elements of Nature/Elements of Reasoning (June 17-20, 2024). Significant funding is available. The application deadline is February 15, 2024.

The Angelicum Thomistic Institute, in collaboration with Hong Kong Baptist University, is advertising a summer seminar on Asian philosophy and scholasticism: Peace, Inside and Out. Both graduate students and post-doctoral scholars are eligible to apply, and funding is available for all participants (July 15-26, 2024, Hong Kong). The application deadline has been extended to February 29, 2024.

There’s a major conference in two weeks in Paris on New Social Perspectives in Medieval Philosophy, organized by Ana María Mora-Márquez (Gothenburg) and Jenny Pelletier (Gothenburg) (February 12-14, 2024).

The Aquinas and the Arabs International Working Group is advertising its twelfth annual graduate conference (online, March 15-16, 2024). The cfp deadline is February 9.

Thomas Aquinas College (California) is again organizing a Thomistic summer conference, this year on the theme of Virtue, Law, and the Common Good (June 13-16, 2024). The cfp deadline is February 19.

Babes-Bolyai University, in Romania, is organizing a conference in April on medieval theories of the internal senses (April 19-20, Cluj-Napoca). There’s a call for abstracts that expires February 20th, 2024.

The Carmelite Institute in Rome, in collaboration with the IRHT-CNRS in Paris, is organizing a workshop on John Baconthorpe (May 9-11, 2024, in Rome). Proposals should be sent, by March, to Monica Brinzei.

Quaderni di Noctua, the open-access Italian journal, has put out a call for papers on the work of Henry of Harclay. Interested scholars should contact Francesco Fiorentino (Bari) by March 31, 2024.

The Aquinas Institute (Wyoming) is advertising bargain-priced paperback editions of its bilingual Aquinas volumes. The only catch is that these editions are for sale only outside the United States. Details here.

Congratulations to Stephen Ogden (Notre Dame) for winning an NEH fellowship to support his next book project, in which he is building on his work on Ibn Rushd on intellect to take on the topic of the active intellect in Ibn Sīnā.

Congratulations to Shane Duarte (Notre Dame) for winning an NEH fellowship to support the latest of his book-length translations of Francisco Suárez. The project the NEH is funding is Metaphysical Disputations 30, on arguments from natural reason for God’s existence and nature. Shane has already published beautiful faithful bilingual editions/translations of DM I-IV (CUA Press, 2021-2023), and he tells me that he hopes, in time, to press on to translate DM 5-11. If you see him at a conference, buy him a beer or two.

Updates from December 2023

The University of Toronto has advertised a senior position in classical Islamic philosophy. This is the faculty line currently held by Deborah Black who is, alas, retiring. The application deadline is January 11, 2024.

Tamer Nawar (Barcelona) is advertising two three-year postdoctoral positions and two four-year PhD positions, in association with his ERC project on Truth in Ancient and Medieval Philosophy. The application deadlines are the end of February 2024.

The Extending New Narratives project is advertising two one-year postdocs, focused on “research related to the retrieval and recognition of philosophical works by women and individuals from other marginalized groups in both the European and non-European traditions” from the 9th century forward. Details here. The application deadline is January 3, 2024.

The History of Philosophy Forum (Notre Dame) is advertising various small grants for scholars seeking to conduct research for several weeks at Notre Dame. Details here. The application deadline is March 15, 2024.

Notre Dame is also advertising its annual Mellon Junior Faculty Fellowship in Medieval Studies. This is a year-long fellowship aimed at scholars who are assistant professors at North American universities. The application deadline is February 1, 2024. Details here.

The monthly KU Leuven hybrid Colloquium in Medieval Philosophy has announced its schedule this academic year, on the general theme of “Encounter, Dialogue, and Integration: The Reception of Western Medieval Philosophy in East Asia.” The schedule, and details on how to join, by zoom or in person, can be found here.

The XXIV European Symposium in Medieval Logic and Semantics has extended its cfp deadline until December 20th, 2023. The theme is Truth, Falsity and Lying (Parma, June 17-20, 2024).

The University of Tulsa (Oklahoma) is holding an interdisciplinary conference in March to honor the 750th anniversary of Thomas Aquinas’s death (March 7-9, 2024). The Cfp deadline is December 31, 2023. Participants will receive a travel stipend.

Symposium Thomisticum VII meets next June on the topic of Aquinas in History. The cfp deadline is February 29, 2024 (Vienna, June 6-8, 2024).

St. Louis University is advertising its annual interdisciplinary Symposium on Medieval and Renaissance Studies. They welcome proposals for individual papers and complete sessions (June 10-12, 2024). The submission deadline is December 31, 2023.

The annual Marquette Summer Seminar on Aristotle and the Aristotelian Tradition has put out a call for submissions. This year’s topic is “Knowledge, Nous, and Noetics in Aristotle and the Aristotelian Traditions” (Milwaukee, June 24-26, 2024). The cfp deadline is February 15, 2024.

The International Society for the Study of Medieval Theology is holding a conference next summer on The End: Finiteness, Death, and Completion in Medieval Theology (Utrecht, June 26-28, 2024). The application deadline is December 20th, 2024.

The SIEPM has put out the call for proposals for its 2024 annual colloquium, in Prague, on the topic Communities of Debate: Collective Intellectual Practice in Medieval Philosophical Thought. (Sept. 4-6, 2024, Prague). Cfp deadline is Jan. 31, 2024.

Congratulations to Stephen Ogden (Notre Dame), who has won the annual book prize from the Journal of the History of Philosophy for Averroes on Intellect (OUP, 2022).

Congratulations to Colin Murtha (Nijmegen) for winning the SMRP’s 2023 Founder’s Award for the best paper by a younger scholar. The paper’s title is “A Stratified World: Avicenna’s Theory of the Sublunary Strata.”

Back in October, Brill and De Gruyter announced that they would be combing as a single press, De Gruyter Brill. To be exact, De Gruyter is buying Brill. It will be interesting to see the impact this has on these two important presses in our field.

C. H. Kneepkens (1944-2023)

I am sorry to report that Onno Kneepkens died last week. He was professor of medieval Latin at the University of Groningen until his retirement in 2009, and published quite extensively on medieval logic and grammar. He served for many years as editor of Vivarium, and was a beloved colleague and mentor over his long career to many scholars.

News from October 2023

The Aquinas and the Arabs International Working Group (AAIWG) is advertising online classes in both Latin and Arabic. The Latin course, which is for beginners, is free, but it begins tomorrow morning (October 7). The Arabic course–classical Arabic at various levels of instruction–involves a fee. Details here.

There’s a large international conference on medieval theories of intentionality scheduled to begin in 10 days in Romania. There apparently is an online option to attend the conference, although I have not found details online. For participants and contact information see here. (Babes-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, October 16-17, 2023).

The whole of the Corpus Philosophorum Danicorum Medii Aevi is now available, for free, in electronic form, here. If you’re looking for So-and-So “of Dacia,” this is the place.

Congratulations to Andreas Lammer (Nijmegen), who has just won an ERC Starting Grant on the topic Avicenna Live: The Immediate Context of Avicenna’s Intellectual Formation. This €1.5M grant will fund a team of scholars working on this project for 5 years. Scholars seeking to work in this area should keep an eye out for opportunities to be funded through this grant.

David Burrell (1933-2023)

Father David Burrell died this past Sunday. He was a member of the Congregation of Holy Cross, and spent most of his teaching career at the University of Notre Dame, where he had also been an undergraduate. His many publications are concerned especially with interfaith dialogue among the Abrahamic traditions. There is a brief obituary here.

Edith Dudley Sylla (1941-2023)

I have just learned that Edith Sylla died on May 12th, 2023.

She was one of the central figures in the later twentieth-century flourishing of interest in medieval European science. Her dissertation (Harvard, 1970) on the Oxford Calculators set the tone for the central focus of her research, on later medieval movements toward an exact, quantified science of motion and qualitative change. She spent most of her career teaching at North Carolina State University.

Zénon Kaluza (1936-2023)

I am sorry to report that Zénon Kaluza died on Sunday night. His many publications over his long career focused especially on Latin philosophy from the later thirteenth and fourteenth century, sometimes written in his native Polish but mainly in French. Among his prominent works are Les querelles doctrinales à Paris : nominalistes et réalistes aux confins du XIVe et du XVe siècles (1988), Nicolas d’Autrécourt, ami de la vérité (1995), and Études doctrinales sur le XIVe siècle: Théologie, Logique, Philosophie (2013). Already in 2002, a festschrift was published in his honor, Chemins de la pensée médiévale : études offertes à Zénon Kaluza (Brepols).

Markus Fuehrer (1944-2023)

Professor Fuehrer spent his entire career teaching at Augsburg University (Minneapolis), retiring in 2021. Among his notable publications are several books on Nicholas of Cusa, a translation of Dietrich of Freiberg’s Tractatus de intellectu et intelligibili (Marquette UP, 1992), and his edition of volume 30 of the Henry of Ghent Opera omnia. He died on January 21, 2023.