Title: Nicholas of Cusa and the Comparison of Plato and Aristotle in the 15ᵗʰ Century: Sources, Controversies, and Intellectual Networks
Date: February 18–19, 2025
Location: University of Siegen, US-A 120
Organizers: Prof. Dr. Mario Meliadò, Dr. Luca Burzelli, Fabian Marx
Description: While Nicholas of Cusa's work has historically been viewed through the lens of Platonism or anti-Aristotelian criticism, his engagement with the intellectual exchanges surrounding the Plato-Aristotle controversy of the 15ᵗʰ century has remained largely unexplored. This conference captures this crucial yet often overlooked aspect of Cusa's thought by mapping the networks of manuscript circulation, personal relationships and philosophical allegiances that informed Cusa's comparative analysis of Plato and Aristotle.
Title: Transnational Renaissance: The Making of a Modern Idea Between Germany and Italy
Date: November 20–24, 2023
Location: Villa Vigoni, Menaggio (Italy)
Organizers: Prof. Dr. Alessio Cotugno, Jun.-Prof. Mario Meliadò, Prof. Dr. Cecilia Muratori
Description: The congress was devoted to the linguistic, historical, and philosophical genealogy of the modern concept of “Rinascimento.” It cast light especially on the appropriation and transformation of German scholarship in 19ᵗʰ-century Italy (directly, or via France). The hypothesis that we will explore collaboratively is that this transfer of knowledge led to a new definition of “Rinascimento,” both as a word and as an idea. We wanted to investigate the different reactions stimulated by the reception in Italy of classical accounts of the Renaissance, especially those by Hegel, Schelling, Tennemann, Michelet and up to Burckhardt. Combining paper presentations with reading seminars, the congress addressed philosophical historiography as a practice founded on international exchange, inquiring into its intellectual, political, and social motives.
Title: Denken am Seitenrand. Marginalien in der Philosophie des Mittelalters und der Renaissance
Date: September 29, 2023
Location: University of Siegen, US-A 120
Organizer: Jun.-Prof. Mario Meliadò
Description: The conference “Denken am Seitenrand. Marginalien in der Philosophie des Mittelalters und der Renaissance” (“Thinking in the Margins: Marginalia in Medieval and Renaissance Philosophy”) was the 16ᵗʰ annual meeting (Dies Quodlibetalis) of the Gesellschaft für Philosophie des Mittelalters und der Renaissance (GPMR). The focus was on marginalia—that is, notes written in the margins of manuscripts and books. Contrary to the common assumption that they are merely secondary comments, they were treated here as important sources for the history of philosophy. Marginalia concretely document how texts were read, understood, and interpreted, and they provide insight into doctrinal positions, interpretative emphases, or even lack of interest—dimensions that can hardly be reconstructed from the main texts alone. At the same time, marginalia open a window onto the “workshop of reading” of earlier scholars: their working methods, note-taking techniques, collaborations, and intellectual networks. This perspective connects questions from the history of philosophy with philological and cultural-historical approaches. The conference paid particular attention to the Latin and Arabic philosophical traditions of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance during the transition from manuscript to print culture.
Link to the poster and programme
Title: L'institution philosophique française et la Renaissance: l'époque d'Étienne Gilson
Date: October 8–9, 2021
Location: Centre Panthéon, Salle 6, 12 place du Panthéon, 75005, Paris
Organizers: Jun.-Prof. Mario Meliadò, Prof. Dr. Marie Dominique Couzinet
Description: These study days on the topic of “the French philosophical institution and the Renaissance” were devoted to the “era of Étienne Gilson.” Their aim was to continue the reflections initiated in L’Institution philosophique française et la Renaissance : l’époque de Victor Cousin (ed. D. Couzinet, M. Meliadò, Brill’s Series in Philosophical Historiographies, Brill, Leiden, 2022), and to further investigate the intellectual, ideological, and political challenges involved in the practice of writing the history of philosophy in France between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In this context, particular attention was devoted to examining more closely the historiographical status of Renaissance thought, especially within the framework of the era of Étienne Gilson.
Link to the poster and programme
Title: The Dissident Renaissance: Rewriting the History of Early Modern Philosophy as Political Practice
Date: March 3–4, 2020
Location: University of Siegen, US-A 120
Organizers: Jun.-Prof. Mario Meliadò, Dr. Cecilia Muratori
Description: This workshop addresses philosophical historiography, along with historiographical practices more generally, as a device of intellectual dissidence. In particular, it focuses on the construction of philosophical genealogies of early modern Europe which, pursuing an ethical and political agenda, challenged dominant historiographical narratives and assumptions. We aim to discuss a series of case studies in the history of Renaissance scholarship from the late 17ᵗʰ until the 20ᵗʰ century. We will explore how in times of cultural and political crisis, the scholarly rediscovery of otherwise marginalized thinkers or intellectual traditions often served the development or the legitimization of an ideal of social, religious or moral reform. The most influential philosophical accounts of the rise of modernity as the age of reason (especially those of J. Brucker, W. G. Tennemann, G. W. F. Hegel in Germany, and of V. Cousin in France) did not attribute any theoretical autonomy to the notion of Renaissance. This approach led to what Charles Schmitt in the 20ᵗʰ century labeled the disappearance of the Renaissance from histories of philosophy. The workshop aims to qualify this verdict by examining neglected historiographical paths and exploring the motives for their critical stance towards the dominant narratives. The purpose is not just to understand why the Renaissance was “lost,” as Schmitt put it, but also to explore why and how it resurfaced in a set of relatively minor or peripheral reception histories.
Link to the poster and programme
Title: L'institution philosophique française et la Renaissance : l'époque de Victor Cousin
Date: June 21, 2019
Location: Bibliothèque Interuniversitaire de la Sorbonne, 17, rue de la Sorbonne, 75005, Paris
Organizers: Prof. Dr. Marie Dominique Couzinet, Jun.-Prof. Mario Meliadò
Description: The study conference was devoted to the institutional and political framework conditions of writing the history of philosophy in France between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with particular emphasis on the Renaissance. Its point of departure was the initially marginal institutionalization of teaching Renaissance philosophy in 1841/42 in Strasbourg by Giuseppe Ferrari. This initiative stood in clear contrast to the dominant teaching of Victor Cousin at the Sorbonne, who denied the Renaissance both philosophical autonomy and systematic significance, interpreting it merely as a transitional phase between scholasticism and Descartes. Ferrari’s lectures, which were suspended under suspicion of atheism, by contrast treated the Renaissance as an autonomous and potentially dissident object of inquiry—also in connection with the historical work of Jules Michelet. The conference examined to what extent this conflictual genesis shaped, in the long term, the conceptual, ideological, and polemical patterns of Renaissance historiography. It focused on three main aspects: the debate over the status of the Renaissance as a “philosophical epoch,” its political and cultural instrumentalization in the nineteenth century, and the differing positions within the cousinist school and their reception. The conference was accompanied by an exhibition on Victor Cousin’s literary estate at the Sorbonne.
Link to the poster and programme
