The Art of Thinking in the Enlightenment: An Interdisciplinary Reappraisal
Project Director: Sorana Corneanu
Financed by UEFISCDI (project number PN-III-P4-PCE-2021-1407)
The project aims to investigate the nature of logic understood as an ‘art of thinking’ in the European c17-18 and to highlight logic’s contribution to a conception of thinking as guided goal-directed activity prone to failure, which was to become a core ingredient of the philosophical and cultural Enlightenment.
Between truth and freedom: Enlightenment answers to ‘thinking for oneself’
Project Director: Tinca Prunea
Financed by UEFISCDI (project number PN-III-P4-ID-PCE2020-2579)
Our research project focuses on one of the central driving ideas of the German Enlightenment, “thinking for oneself” or autonomous thinking (Selbstdenken). We propose to analyze the evolving definition of thinking for oneself and the conditions of its acquisition and practice within three main strands: 1) the pedagogical texts and compendia of the time; 2) the medical writings of the ‘rational physicians’; 3) the political reflection on the freedom of thought and on autonomous reasoning, as well as on the conditions that political powers must ensure in order to promote and safeguard Selbstdenken. We will focus on the practices and strategies elaborated by the enlightened thinkers in order to ensure the attainment of an autonomous use of reason, while taking into account the philosophical assumptions underpinning the idea of thinking for oneself and its transformations in the long eighteenth century. The project will offer the first comprehensive account of the idea of thinking for oneself in the German Enlightenment, with particular emphasis on the novel contexts of its elaboration and its envisaged applicability.
Faces of Cinematographic Modernism
Project Director: Mihai Ometiță
Financed by UEFISCDI (project number PN-III-P1-1.1-PD-2019-0373)
The project aims to elucidate the philosophical character of the relation between cinema, late modernity, and artistic modernism, which is under-specified in current debates from media studies. Recent cultural theorists have often emphasized that an adequate understanding either of the cinematographic medium, or of late modernity, calls for scrutinizing them in conjunction. Those theorists, however, do not establish conclusively whether the relation between cinema, late modernity, and artistic modernism is a) external or b) internal. In case a), each relatum could have still evolved in the way it did, while historically independent from the other two. In case b), the historical evolution of the three relata is inconceivable outside the triad. The project will reappraise the triadic relation, by drawing on three philosophers, who advanced convergent takes on it, at different points in the 20th-century: Ludwig Wittgenstein in unpublished manuscripts from the 1930s, Maurice Merleau-Ponty in several versions of a programmatic essay from the 1940s, and Stanley Cavell in a book from the 1970s, nowadays influential in film-philosophy.
A holistic approach to social and institutional accountability in the late Middle Ages
Project Director: Ionuț Epurescu-Pascovici
Financed by UEFISCDI (project number PN-III-P4-PCE-2021-0238)
This project proposes a holistic approach to late-medieval social and institutional accountability, focusing on two promising yet underexplored topics: (1) the role of the textual passages (notes, memoranda, and instructions) inserted in the accounts not merely to provide context for the numeric figures but, crucially, to define the parameters of accountability; and (2) the relation between the use of accounts (‘computi’) in the state administration and in the domestic sphere, specifically as regards the family account books known as ‘livres de raison’.
Imagistic violence. A phenomenological approach
Project Director: Cristian Ciocan
Financed by UEFISCDI (project number PN-III-P4-ID-PCE-2020-0791)
This project aims to describe, analyse and interpret, by means of the specific conceptual tools of phenomenology, the experience of imagistic violence and its mode of constitution. Our research will seek to analyse in particular the structural changes that occur when shifting from the real and present experience of violence to the experience of imagistic violence. We will explore, on the one hand, the way in which the experience of violence is modified through the image and, on the other hand, how the pictorial experience is constituted in the particular case of displaying violence. Our goal is to identify, at the level of the experience of violent images, its distinct ways of organization, the role of the interpreting consciousness, the a priori conditions of meaning, the different regional ontologies involved.
Making Modern Science: tracing the dynamics of a ‘Cartesian Newtonian textbook’ during the Scientific Revolution
Project Director: Mihnea Dobre
Financed by UEFISCDI (project number PN-III-P1-1.1-TE2019-0841)
The present project tackles several key-issues pertaining to the history of philosophy and science. It deals with the uneasy question of “nonsense” in the historiography of the early modern Scientific Revolution. It addresses some of the most recent concerns with the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries “philosophical canon” (Shapiro 2016) and “contextual revolution” (Mercer 2019) emerging from the current reshape of the discipline. The project will investigate the complex and dynamic relationship between Cartesianism and Newtonianism, but instead of revisiting Descartes and Newton, it will focus on figures such as Jacques Rohault and Samuel Clarke, who were instrumental in promoting the new science.
Recipes, ‘technologies’, experiments: Enactment and the emergence of modern science
Project Director: Dana Jalobeanu
Financed by UEFISCDI (project code PN-III-P4-ID-PCE-2020-0251)
This PCE Research Grant devoted to the investigation of the transformation of the recipe format in the seventeenth century was hosted by the ICUB-Humanities. In between 2021 and 2023 we have explored various forms of recording of ‘recipes’ and ‘secrets’, looking at how knowledge was embodied (an encoded) in these recordings. Our focus was the process of disambiguation through which tacit knowledge embodied in the recipes was gradually spelled out, tried, tested, reformulated and transformed. We have called this process “enactment”; and, in the past three years, we have investigated and brought to light various strategies of enactment. Some of these strategies end in experiments and experimental reports properly speaking; in some cases, involving sophisticated instruments of detection and measurement (Jalobeanu 2021, 2023). In some other cases, as we have shown, enacting recipes does not lead to scientific experimentation, but to what we have called ‘technologies’ (Jalobeanu 2016, 2020). In the past three years we have shown how this has happen in several case-studies (Jalobeanu and Matei 2022, Matei 2022). (More on “technologies” here).
Our greatest achievement was to uncover and place on the map of the early modern studies an almost forgotten philosopher, Henry Power (1621-1668). The author of a single and widely-quoted book, Power is, however, insufficiently understood, mainly because his large archive (of notebooks, draft treatises, commonplace books, correspondence) has never been thoroughly investigated. We have read some of these manuscripts (hosted by the British Library) and we have managed to transcribe, so far, two of them. In several of our talks we have explored the inter-relationship between Power’s manuscript works and his published Experimental philosophy. We have organized a panel on Henry Power in the online seminar Princeton Bucharest Seminar in Early Modern Philosophy (see here the recording). We have proposed a special issue on Henry Power to the Annals of science. The proposal was accepted and the volume will be submitted by the end of 2024.
Saint-Making and Institutional Consolidation: the Veneration of Metropolitans in 14th-16th Century Muscovy
Project Director: Iulia Nițescu
Financed by UEFISCDI (project code PN-III-P1-1.1-PD-2021-0234)
This project addresses the emergence of the local cult of the Moscow-based metropolitans of all Rus’ from the 14th to mid-16th century. I aim to identify and analyse the various rituals established in connection to the veneration of metropolitans in Muscovy and to contextualize their emergence in relation to the institutional development of the Russian Church.
Understanding: phenomenal and epistemic aspects
Project Director: Andrei Mărășoiu
Financed by UEFISCDI (project code PN-III-P1-1.1-PD-2019-0535)
What is it to understand something? Often, when we undergo conscious experiences such as having an intellectual intuition, an “Aha” moment or experiences of flow and familiarity, we do so in coming to understand something new, or in drawing on an understanding we already shared. For instance, in playing chess, a move may simply strike you as the best to make and that may express your understanding of the position on the chessboard. Or you may experience awe and suprise when finding a winning combination.
These experiences may be classified by a phenomenology of understanding. But what is understanding, epistemically speaking? On some occasions we solve problems by better understanding something. Understanding often makes for a more coherent worldview, better anchors our beliefs in fact and evidence, and may often result as a product of our reflection or of our intellectual abilities. In different circumstances, we should expect the relevant epistemic norms for successful understanding to likewise differ.
Hence the question this project tackles: how do the epistemology and the phenomenology of understanding relate? It seems implausible that there’s no connection whatsoever between our conscious intellectual experiences and the growth in understanding that they accompany. Do such experiences then cause us to understand, or are they mere accompaniments, or do they partly constitute the understanding they evince? Clearly, we should appraise different phenomenal-epistemic links differently, and there may be no unique answer. Does that preclude any philosophical approach to types of conscious experiences and epistemic norms for understanding?