19-20 November 2020, Pisa, online participation available

VivaMente_Medicine in the age of Descartes Programme

This first round of the Vivamente Conference in the History of Ideas  aims at drawing attention to the place of medical knowledge,  practice and experimentation in Descartes’ philosophy and to the various ways it developed following the efforts of its early and late proponents. It further aims at recapturing recent trends in Cartesian scholarship as well as at exploring different interpretations, and issues both in relation to Descartes’ own philosophy and with regards to the acceptance and opposition it faced in the early modern history of knowledge and science. Lights and shadows emerging from this analysis would help drawing a new intellectual portrait of the philosopher who studied the passions of the soul en physicien and equated the living body to a machine.

This event is organised by Fabrizio Baldassari and Fabio Zampieri. It is part of the research project The Overlooked History of Vegetal Life. From the Vegetative Soul to Metabolism in Early Modern Philosophy and Biomedicine (PN-III-P1-1.1-PD-2016-1496), PI: Fabrizio Baldassarri, carried out within the ICUB.