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of soul with a special emphasis on Leibniz's theory of emotions and I thought it would be great if I could find some unpublished material by Leibniz to be able to offer some novel insights to his theory.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.

Edinburgh, Aberdeen, Dundee & Glasgow, May 2012

Professionally, May was the most important part of the stay. I gave a paper on Leibniz and Spinoza on affects in Scottish Seminar of EarlyModern Philosophy in Aberdeen. I had only one month to learn Spinoza and write the paper, but judging by response it went down well. The paper needs more Spinoza-reading an rewriting, but I am confident it will turn out to be an article. Met some interesting people too as well as meeting again some old acquaintances. Aberdeen on the whole was not my dream town, bleak, cold and grey although the university campus was nice.

Right after SSEMP I attended The annual conference of British Association for the History of Philosophy in Dundee, entitled Spinoza: the infinite, the eternal with a special emphasis on the book V of the Ethics. Most interesting conference, although my limited knowledge of Spinoza hindered a bit my efforts to take in everything. Got to read the Ethics again ASAP. Dundee was a more likeable town, much like Edinburgh in fact.

During these conferences I discussed with many about career opportunities and though I try not to worry too much about it, it is clear that I should try to learn more about contemporary philosophy. Finland is a small country and in order to get a job in philosophy, one has to know something about everything. So I have bought some books about contemporary philosophy of mind, epistemology and metaphysics here - one can get textbooks second hand with some hunting. Also attended a two day congress on epistemology in the University of Edinburgh. It was interesting stuff, but I find it a bit difficult to orientate thinking through things, not thinkers. Lot of reading to do, I am afraid. And have to attend conferences whenever there are those in Helsinki.

After the conferences in early May I have been mostly working on an article manuscript on Leibniz, Sophie and disinterested love which was given as a paper in March this year in Budapest and which will be published in a Hungarian journal. I am pretty happy with the paper so far. Other thing is that there is going to be a package of Leibniz-stuff fortcoming in niin & näin and I will edit the whole thing with Tuomo Aho. So I have been reading the texts and going through translations. I also interviewed Dr. Pauline Phemister for the magazine. The whole thing should be ready by end of June.

Outside of work, business of usual with my beloved wife. Charity shops, museums, pubs and movies. The highlight - literally - of the month was climbing to Arthur's Seat, the small mountain besides Edinburgh, and Salisbury crags, too which is beside it. Was not that hard to do, after all, although my Vertigo was a bit of a problem. We also went to the zoo which included a lot of climbing! Loved the penguins and the sea eagle was really impressive. I also loved the Forth Bridge boat ride - the railway bridge is fabulous and also visited an island and saw some wildlife seals busking in the sun on a great May day. Unforgettable.

 

Socially I've met some Finnish philosophers here who came to visit Edinburgh or live here - temporarily, at least. Besides this, there are the gatherings of the researchers of the IASH on fridays, pubs and discussions from all kinds of topics.

Pubs - that is something I am going to miss. And real ales - sigh. Having a lot of fish and chips, too. We finally got around to visit Glasgow with Susanna in the first weekend of June. Glasgow is not a pretty town, it is dirty, often ugly and noisy place. The west end, especially the university area is nice, though, with lots of cafes and second hand book stores etc. And the Kelvingrove art gallery was a nice place, although bit messy. With a Spitfire hanging from the ceiling!

Bought a lot of books there and had to carry them all the way to Edinburgh! The posting of all this stuff will cost a fortune, but most of it is included in my budget plan.

Coming up in June: Highlands, Locke Workshop in St. Andrews. Stay tuned!

Two weeks in Leibnizland

I spent the latter two weeks of September in Hannover, Northern Germany. Hannover is in fact the best place to study Leibniz in the world as there within G. W. Leibniz Bibliothek lies Leibniz-Archiv which includes, besides the most extensive collection of commentaries on Leibniz in the world, the microfilms of his manuscripts. In itself Hannover is not a very lively city, but it is a good place to work and has a certain charm - in a quiet, conservative way, although in Steintor where my very cheap hotel was located, there was a good amount of barefoot homeless hippies lounging about. And why not, it was over twenty degrees celcius most of the time.

The library is a kind of funny place. It was built probably in the 70's and includes a lot of bright colours (predominantly green and brown) and lots of tables made out of plastic. The library was formely called as Niedersächische Landesbibliothek, the regional library of Lower Saxony, so it is one of the largest ones in Northern Germany.

I spent three months in the library in 2001, so now I took the opportunity (as I was to attend the IX. Internationaler Leibniz-Kongress in Hannover anyways) and spent a week working in the library. I had prepared myself properly beforehand, so I knew that the texts I needed from Leibniz were already published in the Academy series. So as the database is available in the internet (includes the stuff from the Leibniz-Archiv), I could just print out what I needed beforehand and order away stuff to the reading room. I went through around 30 books a day, looking for interesting articles for different projects going on at the moment of which the most important is Leibniz and emotions.

As I expected, I did not find anything revolutionary, but quite enough interesting material to keep me working for a year at least. In addition, the library has a good collection of journals in the open-shelf-collection, so I could copy published articles. This work was surprisingly heavy and after a day of looking briefly at books and copying stuff from 9-17 I was completely exhausted each night. Some red wine, a baguette and German tv and I was asleep at around nine each night.

At friday of the first week I sent five kilos of copies to Helsinki, crossing my fingers that they arrive safely. And they did. Phew. The weekend went with Flohmarkt (flea market), buying a lot of dirt-cheap vinyl records (of James Last, mostly) and thinking how I will smuggle these all to home (the suitcase weighed 25 kilos, but I got away with it).

Here, btw. are some photos from the visit. And the congress.

The latter week went witht he congress Natur und Subjekt. IX. Internationaler Leibniz-Kongress. I had two papers and both went reasonably well, one on Emotions and the Human Body and one on Uneasiness and the passions. So I can be happy with the conference as a whole. The emphasis of the conference was on philosophy of nature, as the title suggests and there was in fact a good session on the topic. Another popular topic was Locke and Leibniz (partly because Marcelo Dascal's workgroup on the topic covered two sessions), so there was a lot of interesting stuff to follow. As an afterthought the quality of the conference did not quite match the previous one in 2006, partly because it was arranged in September and a lot of English and American speakers had to teach at that time. But again the participants were given three thick volumes of Vorträge of which I am certain I will find lots of interesting material. One nice thing in the conference the first ever session on Leibniz's theory of emotions and I was lucky enough to be the first speaker of that session.

As is usual in these kinds of conferences, the papers are only part of the fun. The social life was well taken care of in the evening receptions and in the Waterloo Biergarten. This was my third Leibniz-Kongress and at this point my face and name was beginning to sound familiar (I flatter myself to think this is also somewhat due to the quality of my papers), so I had an active week, meeting previous acquintances and making new friends. All in all, an enjoyable week. Including a few hours in the magnificent Herrenhausen Gärten which was right next door to the congress (which, I am sorry to say, was not located in the beautiful main building of the G. W Leibniz Universität Hannover).

In saturday I took part on the excursion to the Harz mountains where Leibniz made experiments with (vertical) windmills and the like, trying to pump the water off from the mines as efficiently as possible. Led by an expert, we went by bus to many different locations where Leibniz made his experiments and studied his methods. Our expert was firmly of the opinion that the reason why Leibniz failed was the fact that he was not trying to be a part of the team, but tried to be their boss. He even wrote to the chief engineer in French!

Insiders and Outsiders

I am reading (or rather going through) a new book called "Insiders and Outsiders in 17th-Century Philosophy", edited by G. A. J. Rogers, Tom Sorell and Jill Kraye. It is about the reception of various 17th century philosophers with a rather vague effort to try to put them into different categories which seems to me to be an effort to fool the publisher to accept it rather than a serious attempt to create new ways to see Early Modern Philosophy.

Much I would like to read the whole book, I have time only to the Leibniz-articles. I rather liked the one by Daniel Garber who tooks the trouble to go through Fontenelle's Éloge of Leibniz in detail and some other later French editions of Leibniz's works. Some nice anecdotes also - never knew that the story of Leibniz's marriage is from the Éloge. Herder, according to Catherine Wilson, was also a Leibnizian of sorts. This was also news to me - he even shared a similar picture of human psychology of the Leibniz of New Essays. Robert Merrihew Adams' article on the 20th century reception of Leibniz is more familiar stuff, but of interest is his remark that the Academy-edition does not include a volume for Leibniz's Theological papers which is indeed a little bit strange (to be sure, there are papers belonging to that topic in Philosophical writings). He also speaks nicely about the intellectual fruits of studying Leibniz. 


Btw. The last record I heard was Teenager of the Year by Frank Black.