Princeton-Bucharest Virtual Seminar

The Princeton-Bucharest Virtual Seminar restarts in September.

The Princeton-Bucharest Seminar was established 19 years ago by Dana Jalobeanu, Vlad Alexandrescu and Dan Garber. We have met every summer since in the mountains of Transylvania and the seminar has gradually evolved into an institution, with a reputation for both academic rigor and cordiality. In recent years, we were co-sponsored by the Philosophy Department at Princeton and the Humanities Division of the Research Institute of the University of Bucharest (ICUB).

This year, due to the pandemic, we have decided to go online. We will have weekly meetings every Tuesday from 8 pm (Bucharest time). On zoom and live on our youtube channel (subscribe here)

If you want to get direct announcements from us, please subscribe to our list-serv here

More details about the seminar are available here.

September 8: Yitzhak Melamed (Johns Hopkins University): “Spinoza on causa sui”

September 14: Charles T. Wolfe (Ca’ Foscari University of Venice): “Problems in the History of Materialism” and Omar Del Nonno (Ca’ Foscari University of Venice): “Spinoza’s Account of Imagination and the Baconian Legacy”

September 22: Enrico Pasini (University of Turin): “Philosophical Poetry in the Early Modern Period”

September 29: Panel on Early Modern Wonder. Panel chair: Alex Douglas (University of St. Andrews). Panel papers: Daniel Samuel (Warburg Institute): “Before Wonder: Pre-Cartesian Taxonomies of the Passions.” Lauren Slater (Birkbeck College): “Descartes on Wonder’s Stupor.” Gabriella Wyer (Birkbeck College): “Malebranche on the Uses and Abuses of Wonder.” Steph Marston (Birkbeck College): “Wonder as an Epistemic Hinge in Spinoza.” Richard Elliott (Birkbeck College): “How Wonder Relates to Heidegger’s Critique of Cartesian Philosophy”

October 6: Raz Chen Morris (Tel Aviv University) & Mattia Mantovani (KU Leuven): joint session on optics and perception in Kepler and Descartes

October 13: Richard Arthur (McMaster University), Dan Garber (Princeton University), Christian Henkel (University of Groningen) Anne-Lise Rey (Université Paris Nanterre): round table on Leibniz

October 20: Christoph Lüthy (Radboud University, Nijmegen): “How Lucian’s ‘True Story’ Became True in the Seventeenth Century. And False.”

October 27: Salvatore Carannante (University of Pisa), Claudia Dumitru (Princeton University) & Dan Garber (Princeton University): joint session on Hobbes and Spinoza

November 3: Igor Agostini (University of Salento) & Hanoch Ben-Yami (Central European University): joint session on Descartes

November 10: Graham Clay (University of Notre-Dame) & Michael Jacovides (Purdue University): joint session on Hume

November 17: Filip Buyse (University of Oxford): “Spinoza and Johannes Müller: How the Dutch Philosopher Inspired the German Father of Contemporary Physiology” & Benjamin Goldberg (University of South Florida): “Notions of Experience in Early Modern Anatomy and Pharmacy”

November 24: Jonathan Head (Keele University) & Natalia Strok (University of Buenos Aires): round table on Conway

December 1: Alexandru Liciu (University of Bucharest), Hanna Szabelska (Jagiellonian University), Doina-Cristina Rusu (University of Groningen): joint session on experiments of light

December 8: Ryan Darr (Princeton University) & Dana Jalobeanu (University of Bucharest: joint session on friendship and the divine in Seneca and Shaftesbury