Another two weeks in Leibnizland

I am  back in Hannover. This time there was no really good excuse despite the fact that there was a Leibniz-congress (even in Leibniz-Haus!). To be honest, the primary reason was that I had some travel money left in my post-doc-project and I thought to use it to contribute to my next project to which I am applying funding now. The future project has to do with Leibniz's theory of soul with a special emphasis on Leibniz's theory of emotions and I thought it would be great if I could find some unpublished material by Leibniz to be able to offer some novel insights to his theory. So back to Leibniz-Archiv I go.

 Only this time it wasn't so simple. The library is under renovation until 2015 and the reading rooms are closed. What is left is a small two room complex of book delivery and information. Fortunately for me, the information-room contained a machine for reading and printing microfilms, so the whole trip was not in vain (there is also a possibility to use another machine in the manuscripts department but that has the downside of one being dependent on personnel). But to be frank, as a beginner with microfilms and with people coming and going and speaking in the information-room, what I could do is to go through the microfilms (I've prepared and ordered them beforehand) and print what looked interesting). So now I have a pile of copies of manuscripts in my bag.

A welcomed novelty in the provisory library was a book scanner which saved me a lot of money and trouble. It is free and one can save the scans to a USB-stick, so I did not have to carry a pile of copies with me to the hotel and post them in a package to Finland as I did last time. The scans are of good quality, too. As I was here two years ago, there was not much new books to look at - instead I went for other early modern philosophers like Hobbes and Spinoza, to gather new stuff on them. Well, around 2 gb of scans to read in the future!

 As the library was closed on saturdays this time plus a band holiday which happened to occur during my visit, I had more time to visit museums etc. First I went to the aviation-museum which is in the Hannover Messe-area. I was there before, in 2001, and like the place very much. Not only is there aeroplanes (including, among others, Spitfire, Messerchmidt 109 and Focke Wulf 190), but also instructive walkthroughs of the first attempts to fly, the development of aerial warfere, the life of airmen and so on. Recommended! In addition, I enjoyed the night of the lantern in the Herrenhausen Gärdens. Beautiful lightning in the sublime environment. Beautiful!

As usual, I visited most of the record shops, too. Monster Records in Linden is highly recommended, decent-priced rare indie-stuff as vinyls and bit of cd's, too. 25 Music in Eastern Hannover is a great bet, too. And then there is the flea market every saturday. For some reason, this time I bought more singles than before, probably because of recent dj-activities of me and my wife. Hannover is a good place for that. One could find good stuff from 0.50-1 euro. Bad stuff, too...I bought a pile of Boney M-singles ;)

A Philosophical Travelogue, May-June 2013

Well, folks, the last year of my PostDoc-project is going on and this gives me a special plesure of participating many conferences in order to use the rest of my funding appropriately. This means that I can go basically anywhere I like and am accepted, even without a paper. A rare opportunity! Earlier this year I participated the European Society for Early Modern Philosophy Conference in Grenoble and there are three events in May-June which I will now briefly discuss.

SSEMP, Aberdeen

The first event is Scottish Seminar in Early Modern Philosophy in the University of Aberdeen, organized by Mogens Laerke and Beth Lord. This uninformal seminar is already familiar to me as I gave a paper on Leibniz and Spinoza there last year. The conference was excellent and the same can be said of this year's seminar. Perhaps a little more English philosophy was represented this time, papers on Hobbes (Alissa MacMillan), Toland and Locke (Stewart Duncan), Glanvil (Paul Lodge), Hume and Berkeley (three speakers including keynote James Harris). Then there were two excellent papers on Spinoza by Matthew Kisner and Martin Lin. I see that I am in a stage where I can follow Spinoza-papers without great difficulties. That was not always the case last year. Another trend this year was history of ideas. Other keynote, Leo Catana, gave a paper on the methdology of history of philosophy and there were also few papers on reception.

As last year, Aberdeen is not the most enjoyable of cities, but I reserved a hole day for shopping, finding nice brogues for £14 and the usual books and records. The informality of the congress was also nice - for example, among younger scholars we played tha what-to-take-with-you-to-a-deserted-island-game. And real ale is always a plus.

Ps. I completely forgot about this. So, while in Hannover, September 2013 I can't bring myself to remember all the details of the other events in May-June. Let me just say that the conference in Bucharest, organized by Adrian Nita , on Leibniz's early metaphysics was spot on and included a lot of interesting papers. I just sent my paper on Leibniz's De affectibus to the conference volume which will be published by Springer sometime. I am looking forward to that one! The third event was in Berlin, Humboldt universitet, a reading/discussion course by Martha Brant Bolton which was also excellent! Lots of people really reading the stuff and very good conversation on topics on philosophy of mind which are really interesting to me. Looking forward to further exchange of ideas with MB as I sent her some papers etc. A week in Berlin with my wife was very nice and I am very happy I could do that.