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.