HCAS Symposium
Fable of the Bees After 300 Years
12-14 June 2014
Short Biographies
Hans Blom taught Social and Political Philosophy at Erasmus University, and is presently Visiting Professor at the University of Potsdam. He has also taught at Cambridge University, the University of Buenos Aires, and the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His edited works include Property, Piracy and Punishment: Hugo Grotius on War and Booty in De iure praedae (Brill, 2009), Monarchisms in the Age of Enlightenment (University of Toronto Press, 2007), Grotius and the Stoa (Van Gorcum, 2004), Hobbes: The Amsterdam Debate (Olms, 2001) , and Sidney: Court Maxims (Cambridge University Press, 1996). He is editor-in-chief of the journal Grotiana.
Andrea Branchi, (Ph.D in History of Moral Philosophy, U. of Bologna and M.A. in Early Modern European History, Columbia U., New York), teaches Political Philosophy and History of Ideas at the American University of Rome and works for Rai Storia as author and consultant of historical documentaries and TV programs. He has translated into Italian and edited Mandeville’s Enquiry into the Origin of Honour and the Usefulness of Christianity in War (1732). He is the author of Introduzione a Mandeville and several scholarly articles and essays on moral and political philosophy, military history, history of ideas. His research on Bernard Mandeville focused chiefly on the particular use of the debate on duelling and the history of the ideals of honour and gentlemanliness, as developed by the author of the Fable of the Bees in his larger philosophical project of scientific, unprejudiced analysis of human nature.Branchi's most recent publications include: “The Usefulness of Duelling: Mandeville and the History of Honour” in Stringere la pace, ed. by P. Broggio and M.P. Paoli, Roma, 2011, pp.465-486; “Vanity, Virtue and the Duel: The Scottish Response to Mandeville” (forthcoming). He is also the co-author of the documentaries Cefalonia: crimine di guerra, (2005) and Vita quotidiana sotto la Repubblica Sociale Italiana (2009), and author and director of the documentary The Boys of the 51st Battallion (2011) on the role of the Italian Army in the War of Liberation against Nazi-fascism. Author of the TV series R.A.M. (Research, Archive, Memory), it is currently being broadcast by Rai Storia.
John Callanan is lecturer in the Department of Philosophy at King’s College London. He studied as an undergraduate in University College Dublin and as a postgraduate at the University of Oxford. His primary research area is the history of early modern philosophy, especially Kant. He has published articles on Kant’s theories of analogy, nativism, concept acquisition and geometry. He has also written on transcendental arguments, Strawson’s anti-scepticism and the role of the holy will in Kant’s moral philosophy. He is the author of Kant’s Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals: A Reader’s Guide (Edinburgh University Press, 2013).
Dario Castiglione teaches Political Theory at the University of Exeter. He is currently one of the editors of the ECPR Press. His main research interests are in the history of political thought, with particular reference to philosophical, moral and political discussions in the 18th Century; theories of democracy, representation, citizenship; and the nature of civil and social relationships. He has published on Hume, Mandeville, and 18th-century political thought in general. He has recently contributed a chapter on ‘The Origin of Civil Government’ to the Handbook of 18th-century British Philosophy (OUP, 2013). His other publications include, The Handbook of Social Capital (OUP, 2008); Constitutional Politics in the EU (Palgrave, 2007); The Language Question in Europe and Diverse Societies, (Hart Publishers, 2007), The Making of European Citizens (Palgrave, 2006); and The History of Political Thought in National Context, (CUP, 2001).
Harold J. (Hal) Cook, John F. Nickoll Professor of History at Brown University, has taught and held challenging administrative positions at Harvard, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and the Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine at UCL, and is teaching at Brown and Directing its program in Renaissance and Early Modern Studies. He publishes mainly on early modern Europe, particularly with attention to England and the Netherlands, with two general thematic interests: the ways in which global interactions affected the development of knowledge, and the relationships between knowledge claims and the collective activities usually called “economic.” To do so he helped to establish the method of studying the medical marketplace, has explored the relationships between medical activities and the so-called scientific revolution, has explored problems of translation, and most recently published an award-winning book on medicine, science and commerce in the Dutch Golden Age, Matters of Exchange (Yale University Press, 2007).
After earning a B.A. at Boston University, Prof. Remy Debes completed his PhD in Philosophy at the University of Michigan, where he won awards for both his teaching and his dissertation work, including a Charlotte Newcombe Fellowship in 2005-06. He joined the faculty at Memphis in 2006. His research is in the areas of Ethics and the History of Ethics, with an emphasis on Scottish Enlightenment, Human Dignity, Moral Psychology, Empathy, & the Philosophy of Emotion. Recent work includes "Moral Realism and Moral Rationalism" (in the just published Routledge Guide to 18th Century Philosophy, Ed. Aaron Garrett), "Moral Sentiments" (in the International Encyclopedia of Ethics), "Hume on Personal Merit" (forthcoming in Reading Hume on the Principles of Morals, Ed. Jackie Taylor, OUP), “Adam Smith and the Sympathetic Imagination,” (forthcoming in Adam Smith: A Princeton Guide, Ed. Ryan Hanley), and "From Einfuhlung to Empathy" (forthcoming in Sympathy, Ed. Eric Schliesser, for a volume in the new Oxford Philosophical Conceptseries). Prof. Debes is Guest Editor of "Empathy and Ethics," 2011 Spindel Supplement to The Southern Journal of Philosophy, and "Scottish Reactions to Mandeville," a special issue of the Journal of Scottish Philosophy. He is also the former Secretary-Treasurer for the International Adam Smith Society. Current projects include editing Dignity: History of a Concept (forthcoming in the Oxford Philosophical Concepts series); co-editing with Karsten Stueber, Ethical Sentimentalism (forthcoming from Cambridge University Press); and a new manuscript, Peculiar Perspectives: An Inquiry into Understanding, Respect, and Human Dignity. He will be on sabbatical 2014-2015 to work on his new book.
Aaron Garrett teaches at Boston University. He is the author of books on Spinoza and Berkeley and many articles on early modern philosophy, the editor of the Routledge Companion to Eighteenth-Century Philosophy and (w/ James Harris) the Oxford History of Scottish Enlightenment Philosophy. He is currently writing a pair of connected books on early modern moral philosophy.
Stephen Gaukroger received his BA (hons) in philosophy, with congratulatory first class honours, from the University of London in 1974, and his PhD, in history and philosophy of science, from the University of Cambridge in 1977. He was a Research Fellow at Clare Hall Cambridge, and then at the University of Melbourne, before joining the Philosophy Department at Sydney in 1981. In 2011, he moved to the Unit for History and Philosophy of Science. He is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Humanities, a Corresponding Member of l’Académie Internationale d’Histoire des Sciences, and in 2003 was awarded the Australian Centenary Medal for contributions to history of philosophy and history of science. He is presently Professor of History of Philosophy and History of Science, and ARC Professorial Fellow. Professor Gaukroger’s research is centred on a long-term project on the emergence and consolidation of a scientific culture in the West in the modern era. Two volumes have already appeared: The Emergence of a Scientific Culture: Science and the Shaping of Modernity, 1210-1685 (Oxford, 2005) and The Collapse of Mechanism and the Rise of Sensibility: Science and the Shaping of Modernity, 1680-1760 (Oxford, 2010). He is currently working on the third volume in the series, The Naturalization of the Human and the Humanization of Nature: Science and the Shaping of Modernity, 1740-1845.
Béatrice Guion, a former student of the École Normale Supérieure and an agrégée in Classics, is a professor of 17th-century French literature at the University of Strasbourg, and director of the research group EA 1337, «Configurations littéraires». She is fellow of the University of Strasbourg Institute for Advanced Study, for a project on Bossuet (2013-2015). She is head of the«Colloques, Congrès et Conférences (le classicisme) » and « Mémoires, journaux, correspondances (XVIIe siècle)» collections at the publisher Champion. She is a member of the scientific and advisory board of the Revue française d'histoire des idées politiques and of the Chroniques de Port-Royal. Her research and publications focus mainly on religious literature (namely Port-Royal and Bossuet), on French moralists, on rhetorical and aesthetic thought in the 17th- and early 18th-century, and on the writing of history in early modern Europe. She is also the author of two books: Pierre Nicole moraliste (Paris, Champion, 2002) andDu bon usage de l'histoire:histoire, morale et politique à l'âge classique (Paris, Champion, 2008), and of two critical editions:Pierre Nicole, La Vraie Beauté et son fantôme, et autres textes d’esthétique (Paris, Champion, 1996); Antoine Houdar de La Motte, Textes critiques. Les raisons du sentiment, with Fr. Gevrey (Paris, Champion, 2002).
James A. Harris is Reader in the History of Philosophy at the University of St Andrews. He is the author of Of Liberty and Necessity: The Free Will Debate in Eighteenth-Century British Philosophy (Oxford University Press, 2005), and of articles on Hume, Hutcheson, Reid, Beattie, Priestley, and a number of themes in eighteenth-century British philosophy. He is the editor of The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Oxford University Press, 2013), and also (with Aaron Garrett) of Scottish Philosophy in the Age of Enlightenment (Oxford University Press, forthcoming). He has edited texts by Reid (with Knud Haakonnsen), Beattie, Kames, and Abraham Tucker. He is writing an intellectual biography of Hume for Cambridge University Press, and the eighteenth-century British philosophy volume of the new Oxford History of Philosophy.
Eugene Heath is Professor of Philosophy at the State University of New York at New Paltz. His scholarly work on eighteenth-century moral philosophy includes essays on Mandeville, Adam Ferguson, and Adam Smith, including, most recently, “Adam Smith and Self-Interest” (Oxford Companion to Adam Smith, 2013). With Vincenzo Merolle, he edited two volumes of scholarly essays on Adam Ferguson (Pickering & Chatto, 2008 and 2009), and served as contributing editor to The Manuscripts of Adam Ferguson (Pickering & Chatto, 2005). He has also published essays on various topics in business ethics, as well as the text Morality and the Market: Ethics and Virtue in the Conduct of Business (McGraw-Hill, 2002). He is a co-editor, with Byron Kaldis, of Wealth, Commerce, and Philosophy: Foundational Thinkers and Business Ethics (forthcoming, University of Chicago, 2015) and the lead editor for the Routledge Companion to Business Ethics (forthcoming 2016).
Lawrence Klein is the author of 'Shaftesbury and the Culture of Politeness' (Cambridge, 1994) and the editor of Shaftesbury's 'Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times'. He has published extensively on ideas and practices related to politeness in eighteenth-century British culture and is writing a book on the subject. He is University Senior Lecturer in the Faculty of History at the University of Cambridge.
Adriana Luna-Fabritius got here PhD in History and Civilization at the European University Institute in Florence in 2009 and since then is professor of Western Political Thought at the Centre for Economic Research and Education (CIDE), in Mexico. Her research interests lies in early-modern European political thought, in particular, Italian languages of republicanism, natural law and political economy in European and Hispanic Atlantic contexts. She has recently worked and published on conceptions of human nature, passions and freedom (1650-1836) and on the reading of Thomas Hobbes, Samuel Pufendorf and Johan Gottliedb Heineccius, Giovan Battista Vico, Cesare Beccaria, Antonio Muratori, Antonio Genovesi, Gaetano Filangieri in America. In 2010 she coordinated a special issue on ‘Passions in Literature and Political Thought in Europe 1600-1900’ for the European Review of History and in 2012 the book From Cadiz to the 21st century. Two Hundred Years of Constitutional Tradition in Mexico and Hispanic America. Currently she is working on readings of modern natural law and republicanism in Naples in early eighteenth century.
Dr Christian Maurer is Assistant docteur (Lecturer) at the University of Fribourg (Switzerland), and currently Visiting Research Fellow at the Universities of St. Andrews and Edinburgh (IASH) on a scholarship by the Swiss National Science Foundation. After his studies at the Universities of Berne and FU Berlin, he taught philosophy at the University of Neuchâtel (2003-9) and wrote his doctoral dissertation Self-love in Early Eighteenth-Century British Moral Philosophy: Shaftesbury, Mandeville, Hutcheson, Butler and Campbell. He was doctoral and post-doctoral researcher at the Universities of Glasgow (2006-7) and Blaise Pascal, Clermont-Ferrand (2009-10). Maurer’s research interests include various aspects of 17th- and 18th-century moral philosophy and moral theology, such as the history of self-love in French and British moralists, the passions, the reception of Stoicism, and the encounters of philosophy and theology on doctrinal issues. These themes feed into his interest in Mandeville as a moral and political thinker. With Laurent Jaffro (Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne) and Alain Petit (Blaise Pascal, Clermont-Ferrand), Maurer recently edited and translated Shaftesbury’s Latin manuscript Pathologia, which expounds a Stoic theory of the passions (published in History of European Ideas 2/2013). He is currently working on the Scottish philosopher and theologian Archibald Campbell - another critic of Mandeville.
Emilio Mazza (1962) teaches History of Ideas at the Libera Università di Lingue e Comunicazione IULM in Milan. He has published extensively on Hume, scepticism and modern philosophy. His publications include La peste in fondo al pozzo. L’anatomia astrusa di David Hume (Milano, 2012), an edition and translation into Italian of Hume’s Dialogues concerning Natural Religion (Genoa, 1996) and Descartes’ Discourse on method (Turin, 2012). He edited, with Emanuele Ronchetti, Instruction and amusement. Le ragioni dell’Illuminismo britannico (Padova, 2005) and New Essays on David Hume (Milano, 2007).
Eric Schliesser is BOF Research Professor at Ghent University. He has published widely in early modern philosophy and science, including Spinoza, Newton, Berkeley, Hume, Adam Smith, and Sophie de Grouchy. He also writes about philosophy of economics. He has edited volumes on Adam Smith, Isaac Newton, amongst others, and is the author of a monograph on Adam Smith.