Solipsism and Otherness: Recognizing Minds in Early Modern Philosophy

Online Seminar Series

As a result of the downfall of the concept of ‘soul’ (as well as of the significant geographical and anthropological discoveries of the late fifteenth century), the entire early modern age comes to be the place of fundamental debates on human and non-human intelligence, through which the notion of ‘mind’ is shaped. Such a reassessment conveys also the repositioning of some traditional theoretical and moral issues, including those concerning the relationship of the mind with the extra-mental world, the premises and the mechanisms that regulate the mutual recognition between ‘minds’, and accordingly the criteria that allow one to truthfully identify real ‘minds’ and sentient subjects, and to distinguish them from other beings showing intelligent-like or emotion-driven behaviours.

This online seminar series is therefore aimed at reconstructing significant moments of the philosophy of intersubjectivity in the early modern age (with particular regard to the period 1630-1770), dwelling especially on the conceptual and terminological elements that, in the debates which constitute the very notion of ‘mind’, allow philosophers to account for intersubjective, sympathetic and social phenomena.

Iniziative

DANIEL HEIDER (University of South Bohemia), Suárez on the Involuntary Attention in Angelic Locution SIMONE GUIDI (CNR-ILIESI), Seeing the Other through the Self: Solipsistic and Sociable Angels in Early Modern Scholasticis.
Session 3 - Solipsism and Otherness
Thur. 22 February 2024, 4 PM - CET Time

FABRIZIO BALDASSARRI (Università Ca’ Foscari Venezia), The Mind of Plants: Vegetal Cognition in Pre-Modern Times
JAN PURNIS (University of Regina), Cannibalism and Early Modern Theories of Mind.
Session 2 - Solipsism and Otherness
Thur. 8 February 2024, 4 PM - CET Time

MARTIN LENZ (University of Groningen), The "Irresistible Contagion of Opinion": Hume's Medical Model of Sympathy
JAMES HILL (Charles University), Berkeley and the Threat of Solipsism.
Session 1 - Solipsism and Otherness
Thur. 18 January 2024, 4 PM - CET Time