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.

Prizes & Databases &c.

The SIEPM has awarded its 2022 junior scholar award to Aurora Panzica (Fribourg), for her paper “Antiperistasis as Action on Contrary Qualities and Its Interpretation in the Medieval Philosophical and Medical Commentary Tradition.” Runners up for the prize were Thomas Gruber (Harvard) and Athanasios Rinotas (Leuven).

This prize will henceforth be known as the Jacqueline Hamesse Award, and the deadline to be considered for this year’s prize is June 1, 2023. Details here.

The Society for Medieval and Renaissance Philosophy has awarded its 2022 Founders’ Award (best paper by a junior scholar) to Mohammed Saleh Zarapour (Manchester) for his paper, “Dashtaki’s Solution to the Liar Paradox.”

The SMRP’s deadline for submissions to the 2023 Founders’ Award is June 15, 2023. Details here.

Graziana Ciola (Nijmegen) is advertising two PhD positions tied to her ERC grant on late medieval semantics and mathematics and its Renaissance reception. The application deadline is May 14, 2023. Details here.

The topic of the 44th Cologne Mediaevistentagung is Constellations, understood as “a dynamic and dense network of relationships between persons, ideas, theories, problems and documents” (Cologne, September 9-13, 2024). The cfp deadline is July 31, 2023.

The Semitics department at Catholic University is offering a variety of online summer courses: Arabic, Armenian, Coptic, Ethiopic, Georgian, and Syriac. These are courses focused on reading historical texts, and so ideal for scholarly purposes. They are not cheap–the cost of the Arabic course is around $3000–but this would be an excellent way to get a start at this material. Details here.

A steadily growing resource for readers who work on Latin material is the Corpus Corporum, being developed under the guidance of Philipp Roelli (Zurich). It’s an attempt to assemble a very large corpus of Latin texts, searchable in sophisticated ways, all linked to a large number of classical and medieval Latin dictionaries.

Speaking of Latin databases, Stephen Dumont has called to my attention that Godfrey of Fontaines’s quodlibetal questions are now available in searchable form in Brepols’ Library of Latin Texts. (Do an author search for ‘Gaufridus’!) As I have mentioned previously, this is a useful source for a lot of important texts. Unfortunately, it requires a subscription.

Language Hacks

This is a participatory post. I am hoping to collect suggestions from readers about ways in which they are using technology to cope with foreign languages. The query is intended in the broadest sense, ranging over applications in vacation travel, international conferences, reading secondary literature, working with primary texts in Latin, and so on.

Here’s an example of what I have in mind. You’ll all know about Google Translate. But did you know that, from the web page, you can upload a document and quickly get it translated? (Alas, it does not seem to work with scanned pdfs.) Well, no doubt many of you did know about this. So how about some other examples of this sort of thing?

Since I’m hoping this query will be of interest to others in the community, please respond by leaving a reply to this post (below), rather than by emailing me.

Catching Up on Spring News

It’s been a while since I’ve posted! Here’s a first installment of the news:

LMU Munich is sponsoring a hybrid conference next week on Medieval Arabic and Latin Conceptions of Spirit (March 25-26, 2022). There’s some information here.

There’s a March 31 deadline for various fellowships and grants offered by the British Society for the History of Philosophy.

Philosophers living in circumstances that put them at risk of persecution or harassment are invited to apply for a visiting scholarship at Cornell University. The deadline for application is April 15, 2022.

There’s a conference this spring in Ottawa on the Philosophical Thought of Godfrey of Fontaines (May 11-13, 2022).

There’s a hybrid meeting on late scholastic Iberian theories of ethics and cosmopolitan justice being organized for May by the research group on Thought and Jesuit Tradition in the Early Modernity (PEMOSJ) (May 12-13, Seville). Details here.

Lydia Schmacher (King’s College London) is hosting a hybrid conference on Powers of the Soul in Medieval (Franciscan) Thought (London, May 27-28, 2022).

The Marquette Annual Summer Seminar on Aristotle and the Aristotelian Tradition plans to be back in person this summer, on the topic Intellect, Divinity, and the Good in Aristotle and the Aristotelian Tradition (June 20-22, 2022).

The Max Planck Institute is running a conference next fall on Philosophical Perspectives on Medieval Theories of Science (Berlin, Sept. 27-28, 2022).

The Vicious, Antisocial, Sinful project has announced a medieval workshop for early 2023, in Jyväskylä. Abstracts should be submitted by April 14, 2022. Details here.

Congratulations to Ana María Mora Márquez (Gothenburg), who’s received a five-year extension from the Wallenberg Academy to pursue social epistemology within Aristotelian theories of science. Be on the lookout for one or more postdocs coming out of this project in 2023.

Latest News in the Field

I ought to have posted before now that the Franciscan Institute (St. Bonaventure, NY) is advertising a tenure-track assistant–professor position in theology. They seek candidates whose doctorate is in theology, with a strong knowledge of the Franciscan tradition. The soft deadline was March 1, 2021, but I should think it’s not too late to get an application in.

Christophe Geudens (Leuven) and Nicola Polloni (Leuven) have formed MeLO, the Medieval Logic and Ontology Seminar. They’ve scheduled online talks throughout this spring.

The Max Planck Institute’s research group on premodern sciences is holding a series of online talks this spring, many of interest to medievalists. Details here.

The British Society for the History of Philosophy holds its annual conference, online, on April 21-23, 2021. This year’s topic is Women in the History of Philosophy.

The postponed inaugural conference of the Society for Medieval and Renaissance Philosophy has been rescheduled for October 3-6, 2021 (U. of Notre Dame). Already, they’ve received around 70 proposals for talks, but they’re open to receiving still more, until April 11. Details here.

The Catholic Theological Faculty of Prague has organized a conference in honor of of Professor Stanislav Sousedík’s 90th birthday, focusing on three subjects: Second Scholasticism, Analytical Metaphysics, and Christian Apologetics (October 27-29, 2021). Details here.

A conference on Augustine’s De civitate Dei is being organized in Leuven/Brussels for next January, focused on political doctrine, textual transmission and early medieval reception. Details here; cfp deadline is March 31, 2021.

There’s a new, open-access tool available for the “accurate machine-reading of medieval Latin texts.” The folk who have developed this tool are holding an online training session on March 10, 2021. As I understand it, there are two things here: the Transkribus platform, designed in general for historical texts, and a specialized “model” for medieval Latin. If anyone out there knows more about this program, and how useful it might be for our world, comments to this post would be warmly welcomed.

Finally, I’m sorry to report the death of Fabrizio Mondadori (1943-2021), a longtime professor at the University of Wisconsin in Milwaukee, and the author of a series of brilliant papers on modality, especially the work of John Duns Scotus. There’s a nice obituary here.

How to Read Scholastic Latin

I’ve just read with great pleasure Dylan Schrader’s Shortcut to Scholastic Latin (Paideia Institute, 2019). It’s a brief, reliable, sometimes even charming handbook for beginners, which I recommend having on your shelf for students, if not for yourself.

I do, however, have one complaint: the book seems to me to target the wrong audience. Father Schrader’s intended audience is someone with a solid intermediate grasp of classical Latin, coming to scholastic Latin for the first time. But, in my many years of training people to read scholastic Latin, I find that such students are rare. What I’ve encountered, overwhelmingly, are students who have quickly run through a beginner’s course in Latin, and now wish to put that knowledge to work on texts they actually care about.

Schrader’s Shortcut will help them, for sure, but I think it is not quite the book they need. They don’t need information about the differences between classical and scholastic Latin, since they barely know classical Latin. They need a shortcut to the most important features of scholastic Latin that they probably didn’t acquire from racing through Wheelock’s Latin.

So what are those features? I’m not going to write a book, but here, as my gift for the holidays, is an attempt at a top-10 list:

1. First and most importantly, constantly look for the logical connectives, in particular:

• A ergo B / A igitur B : these always mean that B follows from A.
• A … B enim / A quia B : these almost always mean that A is true because B is true.
• A … B vero / A … B autem : these very often mean that B is an additional, complementary fact beyond A, and especially that B is a minor premise relative to the major premise that is A. (Don’t be fooled into thinking that vero has something to do with truth.)

2. Relatedly, become accustomed to seeing these connectives as, in effect, the text’s punctuation. Here it helps to be aware that, unlike in English, many of these words tend to be used in postpositive position—that is, as the second word in the new clause. And once sentences start to take form around these words, some otherwise confusing particles can be put into this same framework:

• quidem … autem : this works (much like men … de in Greek) to build a construction of the form “On the one hand …, on the other hand….”
• sicut A … ita B: you’ll see this comparative construction everywhere: just as A, so too B.
• tum A … tum B / tam A … quam B: these particles build lists: A and B
• vel A vel B: these particles build disjunctions: either A or B

3. The passive voice. Because logical and causal relationships are nearly everything in philosophy, it is utterly critical (a) to recognize the difference between the active and passive voice; (b) to become proficient at putting subject and object in their proper place when the verb is passive; (c) to bear in mind the common deponent verbs (sequor, loquor, utor, patior…); (d) to be prepared for a verb in the passive voice to be impersonal: dicitur quod …. “it is said….”; (e) to be ready to identify passive infinitives, which are very common.

4. Dependent clauses. This is a large subject, but there are some easy things to look for:

• cum with a subjunctive verb is extremely common and almost always means since/because….
• indirect discourse is extremely common and is routinely done in either of two ways:
  • quod + subjective: Quidam dicit quod anima sit forma
    • do not overtranslate the subjunctive here; it is subjunctive just because it is within a dependent clause; its meaning is indicative, i.e. he says that the soul is a form.
  • accusative + infinitive: Necesse est animam esse formam; “it’s necessary that the soul is a form.”

5. Counterfactual conditionals using the imperfect subjunctive. E.g., Si esset divisa, tunc sequeretur…. (“If it were divided, then it would follow…”). This might seem like an advanced bit of Latin that beginners don’t need to worry about for a while, but in philosophical prose the counterfactual is critical and very common.

6. Gerunds made easy. When dico becomes dicendum, it has assumed noun form as a gerund. Things get tricky here, and Schrader is helpful on the intricacies, but for beginners what’s critical are three usages that appear all over the place:

• modus dicendi : “manner of speaking”; this is the most straightforward use for the gerund; native English speakers who never learned their grammar should note that ‘speaking’ is how we make a gerund in English.
• dicendum est : here the gerund has obligatory force: “it should be said.”
• ad dicendum : here the gerund expresses purpose: “in order to say.”

Part of what’s tricky here is that, in these three cases, the gerund plays completely different roles. But if you simply learn these three fairly well defined usages, you’ll be able to get a long way.

7. The omnipresent impersonal verbs. It helps a lot to recognize fluently the following verbs:

• Oportet quod: it is necessary that
• Contingit quod: it happens (occasionally: it is a contingent fact that)
• Accidit + dative: it occurs to someone/thing (occasionally: it is accidental to)

Bear in mind that licet almost always appears as a conjunction, not a verb. It introduces a subjunctive verb and means Although…. (Here again, don’t overtranslate the subjunctive; cf. #4.)

8. Noun vs. adjectives. In scholastic Latin, word order starts to look a bit like the word order in modern European languages. But because it’s never exactly the same, it’s easy to mistake one part of speech for another—that is, to be confused about what’s a noun, what’s a verb, what’s an adjective, and what’s an adverb. There’s no easy rule here—this is the heart and soul of reading Latin—but one common, easily fixable mistake is to confuse nouns and adjectives. So, forma is the noun and formalis is the adjective. In principle, this is pretty easy, but in practice beginners often fail to catch the difference, in part I think just because they aren’t on guard against the mistake.

9. These phrases need to become second nature:

• secundum x (“according to x”; note that ‘secundum’ only rarely means “second”)
• quantum ad x
• inquantum est x
• propter x

These expressions have shades of meaning, but they all serve a similar function: they bring x into salience as explanatorily relevant.

10. Exploit the compositional nature of Latin. An astonishing number of Latin terms are formed using prefixes such as con-, per-, ab-, ad-, in-, and so on. Learn the connotations associated with each prefix, and become comfortable with the range of meaning suggested by common roots like sisto. Once you’re alert to this sort of thing, expand your reach by attending to cases where common verbs have surprisingly different principle parts, such as fero, tuli, latus. If you can connect latus to fero, and remember that this means “to carry,” you’ll unlock a lot of further composite vocabulary.

Of course, these rules won’t make you fluent in scholastic Latin all by themselves. The only way to achieve that is to practice constantly. I recommend that you find an easy text (Aquinas or Ockham are leading candidates) that has been translated into a friendly language, make a printed copy of the text and the translation (so that you get away from electronic distractions and so you can write notes on the page), and then devote a set time every day (30 minutes?) to working through the Latin and checking yourself against the translation.

Happy Holidays!