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| Society for Early Modern Philosophy | |
|---|---|
| Name | Society for Early Modern Philosophy |
| Formation | 1990s |
| Type | Scholarly society |
| Headquarters | New Haven, Connecticut |
| Leader title | President |
Society for Early Modern Philosophy is an international scholarly association devoted to the study of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century thinkers and contexts associated with the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment. It fosters research on figures and institutions active in the period exemplified by René Descartes, Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and Baruch Spinoza, while engaging with archives, learned societies, and libraries such as the British Library, the Bibliothèque nationale de France, and the Bodleian Library. The Society connects scholars working on topics from the Republic of Letters and salons to courts and colonies, linking debates across historiographies involving the Royal Society, the Académie des sciences, and the Dutch East India Company.
Founded during a period of expanding manuscript studies and digital catalogues, the Society emerged amid interdisciplinary conversations involving the Modern Language Association, the American Philosophical Association, and the American Historical Association. Early gatherings featured papers on individuals like Pierre Gassendi, Nicolas Malebranche, Margaret Cavendish, Anne Conway, Gottfried Leibniz, David Hume, and Immanuel Kant and institutions including the Royal Society of Edinburgh, the Royal Society of London, the Académie royale des sciences, and the Prussian Academy of Sciences. Key moments in its development paralleled major exhibitions and catalogues at the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Hermitage Museum, and the Getty Research Institute, as well as bibliographic projects at the Bodleian Library, the Bibliothèque nationale de France, and the John Rylands Library. Leadership and editorial collaborations drew on scholars affiliated with universities such as Harvard University, University of Cambridge, University of Oxford, Yale University, Princeton University, University of Chicago, Columbia University, Stanford University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, University of Toronto, University of Heidelberg, Leiden University, and University of Amsterdam.
The Society promotes archival research, critical editions, and interdisciplinary dialogue concerning figures like Galileo Galilei, Johannes Kepler, Christiaan Huygens, Robert Boyle, Antoine Lavoisier, Voltaire, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Johann Gottfried Herder, David Hume, and Mary Astell. It sponsors collaborative projects with repositories such as the Wellcome Collection, the Royal Institution, the Kunsthistorisches Museum, the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation, and the National Archives (United Kingdom), and encourages partnerships with foundations like the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, the British Academy, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. The Society advances work on the circulation of manuscripts and printed editions involving printers and publishers including Elzevir, Johann Friedrich Hartknoch, John Baskerville, and Pierre-Jean Mariette, and on networks traced through correspondences like those of Christiaan Huygens, Émilie du Châtelet, Margaret Cavendish, Henry Oldenburg, and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz.
Membership includes scholars, librarians, archivists, and curators from institutions such as The Huntington Library, the Bodleian Library, the Clark Art Institute, the Institute for Advanced Study, Bibliothèque Mazarine, Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin, and the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana. Governance comprises an elected board with officers drawn from departments and centers at University College London, King's College London, Princeton University, Yale University, Brown University, University of Pennsylvania, Northwestern University, University of Michigan, Duke University, University of California, Berkeley, University of California, Los Angeles, McGill University, University of Edinburgh, and University of Glasgow. Advisory committees have included scholars associated with projects at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, the Hermann von Helmholtz-Zentrum, and the Centro Studi di Storia della Filosofia.
The Society organizes annual meetings and thematic conferences hosted at venues like Oxford University Press, Cambridge University Press, the Institut d'Histoire des Sciences, the Bibliothèque nationale de France, Yale University, Harvard University, Columbia University, The British Museum, and the Hermitage Museum. Major conference themes have addressed intersections among Isaac Newton, Robert Hooke, Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, Carolus Linnaeus, Sébastien Leclerc, Cesare Beccaria, Cesare Pavese, Augustin-Jean Fresnel, and Étienne Bonnot de Condillac, and have featured keynote lectures delivered in conversation with curators from the Royal Collection Trust and editors from publishing houses including Oxford University Press, Cambridge University Press, Bloomsbury, Routledge, and Brill. The Society co-sponsors panels with organizations such as the History of Science Society, the Upjohn Institute, the European Society for the History of Science, and the International Union of History and Philosophy of Science and Technology.
The Society issues newsletters, oversees edited volumes and critical editions of texts by John Locke, Thomas Hobbes, Baruch Spinoza, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, René Descartes, Blaise Pascal, Emanuel Swedenborg, Julian Offray de La Mettrie, François Quesnay, and Denis Diderot, and endorses special issues in journals published by Oxford University Press, Cambridge University Press, Johns Hopkins University Press, and Princeton University Press. It grants prizes named in honor of figures like Antony Flew (legacy discussions), Margaret Cavendish (early modern women), and archival awards that recognize work connected to collections at the Wellcome Library, British Library, and Biblioteca Nacional de España. Publication collaborations have included series with Brill, Boydell & Brewer, University of Chicago Press, Routledge, Palgrave Macmillan, and Hackett Publishing Company.
Public-facing programming links exhibitions and lectures at institutions such as the Science Museum, London, the Royal Institution, the Museum of the History of Science, Oxford, the Museum of Science and Industry (Manchester), the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Smithsonian Institution. Educational initiatives engage graduate training networks at Humboldt University of Berlin, Ecole Normale Supérieure, Scuola Normale Superiore, University of Pisa, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, and international summer schools run in partnership with the Max Planck Society and the Wellcome Trust. The Society supports digital humanities projects hosted on platforms developed by the Bodleian Libraries Digital Library Systems, the Harvard Library Digitization, and the Europeana Collections.
Category:Learned societies