Early Modern Thought Research Theme
About the ResearchThe Early Modern Thought Research Theme provides a focus for research on all aspects of early modern thought. The early modern period spans from the mid-16th century to the late 18th century. Areas of special expertise here at Otago include philosophy, literature, theology, medicine, art and politics. The Research Theme fosters interdisciplinary research across these disciplines and includes scholars ranging from senior researchers who are established experts in their fields to postgraduate students who are embarking on their first extended research project. Blog: Early Modern at OtagoThe special research focus from 2012 to 2014 is:
Follow developments within this project by visiting our blog Early Modern at Otago. Director and Steering CommitteeDirectorSteering CommitteeResearchers
Honorary Research AssociatesResearch ProjectsExperimental philosophy and the origins of Empiricism (Marsden Funded Project)(Peter Anstey and Richard Serjeantson (Trinity College, Cambridge)) This project will present the case for a wholesale revision of the way in which 17th- and 18th-century philosophy has traditionally been understood. The distinction between Rationalism and Empiricism has long provided the standard terms of reference by which early modern philosophers and their theories are classified. Yet this distinction was developed by neo-Kantian philosophers in the 19th century. This project will test the hypothesis that the salient (though not the only) terms of reference by which philosophy was understood in this period was the distinction between Experimental and Speculative philosophy. It will argue that these terms of reference provide a richer and more nuanced way of partitioning early modern natural philosophy and moral philosophy. Furthermore, it will demonstrate that the Rationalism-Empiricism distinction should be reinterpreted in the light of the Experimental-Speculative distinction. This will mark a significant advance in our understanding of early modern philosophy and will provide an enhanced framework within which to generate new historical knowledge. Visit the Early Modern Experimental Philosophy blog Extended memory (Marsden Funded Project)(Evelyn Tribble & John Sutton (Macquarie)) This project brings together recent research in philosophy and cognitive science with literary and cultural history to explore the relationship between mind and world in early modern England. A concept central to work in the fields of Distributed Cognition/Extended Mind is that thought is not merely intracranial, but depends instead upon cognitively rich environments that minimize the demands of complex tasks upon individuals. This model, which developed to account for contemporary cognitive practices, can equally illuminate historical and literary questions about historical cognition, or the relationship of individual agency and social practice in the early modern period. This investigation will not only advance understanding of memory in this period, but also will refine and strengthen current theories of Distributed Cognition/ Extended Mind by testing them against specific historical case studies. Women, philosophy and literature in the early modern periodJocelyn Harris and Peter Anstey are editing a special issue for Intellectual History Review on 'Women, philosophy and literature in the early modern period' which is the proceedings from the Otago/Sydney Early Modern Seminar of 2009. Contributors are: Jacqui Broad, Jennifer Clement, Karen Green, Jocelyn Harris, Charles Pigden, Liam Semler, Jane Spencer and Sophie Tomlinson. It will appear in 2012.
Philosophy and literature in the 18th century(Jocelyn Harris) The relationship between philosophy and early modern literature are being empirically explored through the example of the novelist Samuel Richardson, who developed the ideas of the political philosopher Mary Astell into his popular and influential masterpiece, Clarissa. Continuities from Locke to Astell to Richardson to Woolf provide a striking case history of literature continuing to interact with early modern philosophy. Hobbes as poet and Latinist(John Hale) John aims to complete an edition of Hobbes’s Latin verse autobiography and to write a study of his Latin early poem on the seven wonders of the Peak District, in Derbyshire. These form part of a fuller study of Hobbes as Poet and Latinist, and essays comparing Hobbes with Milton, as materialists writing in Latin. Locke on toleration(Vicki Spencer) This project questions whether Locke in his mature work understood toleration as it is commonly viewed today as ‘putting up’ with others’ views, actions or ways of life by investigating the role of virtue in his A Letter Concerning Toleration. His often neglected but spirited argument against the validity of zealots, suggests that tolerance cannot exist side by side with contempt. It also challenges the dominant readings of his Letter as simply providing either a pragmatic defence of toleration based on moral scepticism or a rationalist defence, both of which are recognised as weak. John Owen, Richard Baxter and the Formation of Nonconformity(Tim Cooper) This project examines the complex causes of the strained relationship between two leading English Puritans: John Owen (1616–1683) and Richard Baxter (1615–1693). It also explores the impact of their poor relationship on Restoration Nonconformity: Did that strain prevent any possible healing between the two sides of what was already a divided movement? In this way it will shed light on how this movement developed in a way that looks beyond merely theological factors and differences to ones located in personality and experience, particularly experience of the English Civil War.
The Idea of Peace in the Age of Crusades (Marsden project)(Takashi Shogimen) The European Middles Ages is widely known as the age of Crusades; it was a time of violence against Muslims and heretics. But it was also the period when Christianity, which provided the holistic framework for public and private life, preached peace as the ultimate goal of human life. No attempt has been made to examine comprehensively the idea of peace in medieval political and ecclesiastical writings. Rarely have the origins of modern pacifism and of international law been traced back beyond Erasmus and Grotius respectively. This is a significant lacuna in our understanding, since early modern ideas of war and peace and the subsequent development of international law did not emerge in a vacuum; they can be seen as intellectual responses to medieval scholastic traditions in the new era of 'the voyages of discovery'. This research project aims to highlight the rise of a pacifist impulse among late medieval political thinkers. This study explores the interplay between the Augustinian theology of peace and other intellectual traditions including Aristotelian political science, canon law and military science, thereby offering new insight into the complexity and diversity of the late medieval academic quest for peace.
The Dissemination of Ockham's Theory of Heresy, 1350-1550(Takashi Shogimen) The English Franciscan William of Ockham (c.1285-1347) was one of the most influential philosophers and theologians in late medieval Europe. Recent scholarship has shown his profound impact on logic, metaphysics, epistemology and the philosophy of language in the late Middle Ages and beyond. Less well known is Ockham's polemical career: following a dispute between the papacy and his Order, Ockham abandoned his academic career and devoted himself to anti-papal polemics. At the heart of Ockham's polemical output was a systematic treatise of heresy: Part I of the Dialogus (The Dialogue). Modern scholarship on medieval intellectual history has overlooked the theological and legal conceptions of heresy and Ockham's revolutionary reconceptualization of them, let alone the impact that Ockham's new theory had on later generations of theologians and canonists. This research project examines how Ockham's writings on heresy were assimilated by theologians and canonists of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries including Robert Holcot, Juan de Torquemada, Juan de Segovia, Jacques Almain and Franciscus de Vitoria, thereby highlighting a hitherto unexplored tradition of discourses on heresy in late medieval and early modern periods. Researcher Profiles Professor Peter Anstey is Professor of Early Modern Philosophy in the Department of Philosophy. His research interests lie in early modern philosophy with special reference to the philosophy of science and medicine. He is currently writing (with Dr Alberto Vanzo) a history of early modern experimental philosophy. Professor Andrew Bradstock (Howard Paterson Chair in Theology and Public Issues at Otago since 2009) has a long-standing interest in the 'radicals' of the Civil War years and the Interregnum. He has published widely on the leader and main theorist of the Digger movement, Gerrard Winstanley (the subject of his PhD research), and in 1999 organised an international conference to mark the 350th anniversary of the Diggers' occupation of St George's Hill in Surrey. Andrew's latest book, 'Radical Religion in Cromwell's England: A concise history from the Englsih Civil War to the end of the Commonwealth' will be published by I B Tauris later this year. Dr Tim Cooper is a historian of seventeenth-century England with a particular interest in religious history. He has published books and several scholarly articles on the Puritans, the ‘radicals’ and various aspects of early modern English historiography. Along with Professor Neil Keeble (University of Stirling) and Professor John Coffey (University of Leicester), Tim is working to produce a critical edition of the autobiography of Richard Baxter, to be published in five volumes by Oxford University Press in 2016. The project has received over £500,000 in funding from the AHRC in Britain. Dr Donald Cullington read Classics at Cambridge, then pursued a musical career as performer and teacher, gaining a DMus at Edinburgh in 1974, and in 1984 becoming the first Head of Music at the University of Ulster, from which he retired as Senior Lecturer in 1997. His research since then has consisted mainly of editions and translations of Renaissance texts, not only concerning music – including “That liberal and virtuous art”: three humanist treatises on music (2001) – but also extending to religious and social questions in Early Modern Italy – including Vainglorious Death: a Funerary Fracas in Renaissance Brescia (2006) and “On Everyone’s Lips:” Humanists, Jews, and the Tale of Simon of Trent (2012). Since coming to Dunedin in 2003 he has worked closely with John Hale on a new edition and translation for Oxford University Press of John Milton’s De Doctrina Christiana (also scheduled for publication in 2012), and has recently had an important article (on “The Latin Words for ‘Marriage’ in De Doctrina Christiana, Book 1, Chapter 10”) published in Milton Quarterly 44/1 (2010): 23-37. Associate Professor Greg Dawes lectures in the Department of Philosophy and the Department of Theology and Religion. Greg's earlier work, published in his book The Historical Jesus Question, had to do with the rise of a critical and historical attitude to the Bible in seventeenth-century Europe and its consequences for later Christian thought. His present interests have to do with the complex relations between religion, science, and magic in the early modern period. In particular, he is working on a book-length project on the writings of Giordano Bruno and Galileo Galilei, Bruno being a representative of the age in which religion, science, and magic were frequently merged, and Galileo of the age in which new distinctions were being made. He is also presently working on a study on the rationality of Renaissance magic, to be published in a collection by the Centre for Medieval and Early Modern European Studies (MEDEMS) at the University of Auckland. Professor Terence Doyle is in the Department of Medicine and a consultant physician at Dunedin Hospital, with an MA in Classics and PhD in English. His current research interests are in the influence of Greek studies and language on 16th and 17th century medicine and in the cardiorespiratory physiology of Richard Lower and his associates. Dr John Hale is an Honorary Fellow in the Department of English. He is a Milton scholar and continues to research John Milton’s Latin writings, especially Milton’s theological works. He is currently editing and translating Milton’s De Doctrina Christiana for Oxford University Press and is researching Thomas Hobbes’s Latin poetry. John Hale has been awarded the James Holly Hanford Award for a most distinguished book on John Milton published in 2007 for Milton and the Manuscript of De Doctrina Christiana. Jocelyn Harris is Professor Emerita in the Department of English, University of Otago. With her research in Jane Austen, she has contributed a chapter on Austen's relation to the tradition in The Cambridge Companion to English Novelists (2009); a chapter on Pride and Prejudice and Mansfield Park in the revised Cambridge Companion to Jane Austen (2010); and 'Jane Austen and Celebrity Culture: Shakespeare, Dorothy Jordan and Elizabeth Bennet' in a special issue on Shakespeare and Jane Austen of Shakespeare, 6:1-4, April-December 2010. She chaired a panel on 'Jane Austen and Celebrity Culture' at the annual meeting of the North American Eighteenth-Century Studies Association of America in Vancouver (2011), as well as contributing to a panel discussion on a new abridged Clarissa. In July 2011, she spoke at the Nichol Smith Seminar in Eighteenth-Century Studies (Melbourne) on 'Jane Austen, the Duke of Clarence, and Saartjie Baartman, the "Hottentot Venus"'. In April-May 2012, she will present a longer version of the same paper at St Anne's College, Oxford; and 'Anna Letitia Barbauld and Jane Austen: "Meddling in Politics"' at a Barbauld conference in Chawton. She is currently writing a book entitled 'Satire, Celebrity and Politics in Jane Austen'. Dr Carla Lam is a Lecturer in the Department of Politics. Carla received her PhD in political theory from Carleton University in 2004. She then lectured at Queen’s and Carleton Universities in Canada before arriving in New Zealand in July 2008. Her research interests include: political theory and feminism, especially in the radical and materialist traditions. In terms of early modern thought her work focuses on Hobbes. Carla’s central research themes are: sexuality and reproduction, embodiment, ethics, and the biology/society debate especially as manifested through the history of political ideas. Her current projects include a book on the politics of reproduction in the 21st century, which includes a chapter on Hobbes and early modern forms of political and gender discourse; and an edited collection on contemporary relationships between feminism(s) and academia.
Professor Alan Musgrave has been Professor of Philosophy at the University of Otago since 1970. He has long-standing interests in early modern thought, both scientific and philosophical. A current interest is contemporary essentialist views, and their relation to Locke's distinction between real and nominal essences. Dr Charles Pigden is an Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy. He has published on a wide range of subjects from the analytic/synthetic distinction through conspiracy theories to the existence (or otherwise) of abstract objects. His interest in early modern thought centres on the work of David Hume (though he also has a keen interest in Hobbes, Hutcheson, Mandeville, Price and Reid). Though Charles finds history fun, he is primarily interested in the philosophers of the past for what we can get out of them, and he works at the intersection between early modern thought and contemporary analytic philosophy. Dr Takashi Shogimen is an Associate Professor in the Department of History and Art History. He specialises in the political thought and ecclesiology of late medieval Europe. His recent book, Ockham and Political Discourse in the Late Middle Ages (Cambridge University Press, 2007) offers a fresh reappraisal of the political thought of William of Ockham (c.1285-1347), a Franciscan theologian and philosopher. His current research explores the making of modern European political thought, c. 1100-c.1600, and the cultural identity of European and East Asian political thinking. Dr Vicki Spencer is a Senior Lecturer in political theory in the Department of Politics. Previously she was a Lecturer at the University of Adelaide. Her main area of research has been the late eighteenth-century German philosopher, Johann Gottfried Herder. She has a particular interest in his theories of language and culture, and their links with nationalism, contemporary liberal-communitarian thought, pluralism and multiculturalism. Her most recent project focuses on the concepts of tolerance and humility in early modern and contemporary thought. Professor Lyn Tribbleis Donald Collie Chair of English. Her recent publications include Cognition in the Globe: Attention and Memory in Early Modern England (2011), and (with Nicholas Keene) Cognitive Ecologies and the History of Remembering in Early Modern England (2011). Her current project, for which she has received a Mellon fellowship for research at the Folger Shakespeare Library, is "Ecologies of Skill in Early Modern England." Dr Alberto Vanzo is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Philosophy. His area of specialization is early modern philosophy, especially Kant's philosophy. He is currently working on the Marsden project on experimental philosophy and the origins of empiricism. In particular, he is studying eighteenth century German experimental philosophy and the origin of the notion of empiricism in the late eighteenth century and early nineteenth century. Postgraduate ResearchersCurrent Masters and PhD students who are members of the research theme: PhD
MastersRecent Publications (2010-2012)BooksPeter Anstey, John Locke and Natural Philosophy, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011 Andrew Bradstock, Radical Religion in Cromwell's England: A Concise History from the English Civil War to the End of the Commonwealth, I. B. Tauris: London, 2010 Tim Cooper, John Owen, Richard Baxter and the Formation of Nonconformity, Ashgate: Farnham, 2011 Sue Court, Sigismondo d’India, Fifth book of madrigals arranged for Viol Consort, California, PRB Productions, USA B047 (Baroque Music Series), 2011 Sue Court, Marco da Gagliano: La Flora, A-R Editions Music of the Renaissance, USA, Madison, 2011 Sue Court, Foundations for College Music Theory, Lighthouse Press, Macquarie University, Sydney, 2011 Vicki Spencer, Herder's Political Thought: A Study on Language, Culture and Community, Toronto University Press, 2012 Edited Books and Special Journal IssuesPeter Anstey and Jocelyn Harris, Special Issue on the theme 'Women, philosophy and literature in the early modern period', Intellectual History Review, 22.3, 2012 Peter Anstey, ed. (with Dana Jalobeanu), Vanishing Matter and the Laws of Motion: Descartes and Beyond, New York: Routledge, 2011 Charles Pidgen, ed., Hume on Is and Ought, Houndmillls: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010 Charles Pigden, ed., Hume on Motivation and Virtue, Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009 Book ChaptersPeter Anstey, 'The matter of medicine: new medical matter theories in mid-seventeenth-century England’ in eds D. Jalobeanu and P. R. Anstey, Vanishing Matter and the Laws of Motion: Descartes and Beyond, New York: Routledge, 2011, pp. 61–79 Peter Anstey, ‘Essences and kinds’ in The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy in Early Modern Europe, eds Catherine Wilson and Desmond Clarke, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011, pp. 11–31 Andrew Bradstock, ‘Bunyan and the Bible’, in R Lemon, E Mason, J Roberts & C Rowland [eds], The Blackwell Companion to the Bible in Literature, Oxford: Blackwell, 2009 Refereed Journal ArticlesPeter Anstey, ‘Francis Bacon and the classification of natural history’, Early Science and Medicine, 17, 2012, pp. 11–31 Tim Cooper, “Why Did Richard Baxter and John Owen Diverge? The Impact of the First Civil War”. Journal of Ecclesiastical History 61:3 (2010): 496-516 John Hale, 'Milton's Titles' in Early Modern Literary Studies 13 John Hale, 'Notes on the Value and Function's of Titles', in Cuadernos de Literatura Inglesa y Norteamericana 12. 1–2 (2009), pp. 23–34 John Hale, 'The Problems and Opportunities of Editing De Doctrina Christiana', in Milton Quarterly 44. 1 (2010), pp. 38–46 Jocelyn Harris, “Jane Austen and Celebrity Culture: Shakespeare, Dorothy Jordan, and Elizabeth Bennet.” Shakespeare 6:4 (2010): 410-30 Takashi Shogimen, 'The Best Medicine? Medical Education, Practice and Metaphor in John of Salisbury's Takashi Shogimen, 'European Ideas of Peace in the Late Thirteenth and Early Fourteenth Centuries', The European Legacy: Toward New Paradigms 7 (2010), pp. 871-885. Alberto Vanzo, "Kant on the Nominal Definition of Truth'', Kant-Studien, 101 (2010), 147–166. Alberto Vanzo (with Antonio M. Nunziante), "Representing Subjects, Mind-dependent Objects. Kant, Leibniz, and the Amphiboly", British Journal for the History of Philosophy, 17 (2009), 133-151 (available for Informaworld subscribers at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09608780802548390) International collaborationsProject: Francis Bacon and the reconfiguration of natural history Centre for the History of European Discourses Events2012 Colloquium: "Practical Knowledges and Skill in Early Modern England"The Early Modern Thought Research Theme is sponsoring the University of Otago colloquium on “Practical Knowledges and Skill in Early Modern England.” The colloquium will be held on 27-28 August, with the first day devoted to natural philosophy, science, and religion, and the second day to theatre and performance. Speaking at the conference will be
2012 Post-Graduate Seminar: “Interdisciplinarity in Medieval and Early Modern Research”In conjunction with “Practical Knowledges and Skill in Early Modern England” the Theme will be hosting a post-graduate advanced training seminar on “Interdisciplinarity in Medieval and Early Modern Reseach.” Facilitating the workshop will be
Apply for Bursaries before 31 July 2012Bursaries are available for post-graduate students traveling to the seminar. If you are interested, please apply before 31 July 2012. For further information about these events visit the Early Modern at Otago blog.Links
|
 |