News of October 2022
News about philosophy and its history in October 2022
Opportunities in October 2022
Career and research opportunities in October 2022
Challenges and Opportunities of Doing Medieval Philosophy: An Interview with Alessandra Beccarisi
What were the challenges of managing an academic journal during the Covid pandemic? And what advices can be given to early-career scholars in a period so complicated as the one we are living in? This month, we discuss these fundamental topics with Alessandra Beccarisi, Full Professor of Medieval Philosophy at the University of Foggia and editor of the Bulletin de Philosophie Médiévale (the official journal of SIEPM).
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Philosophy, Dreams, and Coffee: Interview with Maria João Neves
Nowadays, academic articles have become the stage where the development of philosophical research takes place. But publishing is a serious business. It requires a long (and often painful) process of research, redaction, review, and corrections until the articles attain their final printed form and can be shared with others. “But then who reads them?”, asks Maria João Neves, “perhaps only one or two doctoral students, who are interested in those very specific topics.” They rarely reach the larger public, even though knowledge is lacking outside of academia. This is one of the reasons that led Maria João Neves, Doctor in Philosophy and specialist in the work of María Zambrano, to recover the living power of philosophy and bring it out to the public. In her own words, philosophy is not there to “overfeed points of view” (engordar os pontos de vista). In that case, “it is preferable to cumulate less knowledge.”
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Recently published books and volumes
Our selection of books for October 2022
A Review of “Digital Storytelling Pilot Course”
Building a narrative around a scientific concept, or around a corpus, for example, will change how your work is perceived; and the way you communicate it will also change how the public reacts to your message. Having the skills to adapt research language to simplified, unambiguous and, at the same time, captivating storytelling can do a lot for academic research and the communities it wants to impact. We have all seen some of that during Covid-19, with huge amounts of data visualization research supporting public action. Digital Storytelling is, to put it very simply, telling a story using digital tools. It is a figure of style, one could say, that makes use of digital media (image, sound, and movement) to captivate and entangle the user. Depending on the tool one choses, it can also imply the possibility for the user to interact and take part of the story. This means that there is a higher chance that the message and/or meaning of the story gets through to its viewers.
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Taylor Pincin
For this month, our section goes all the way to the US to highlight the work of Taylor Pincin. Taylor is a Ph.D. Candidate at the University of Texas Austin, where she is working on her dissertation Being One and Being Prior in Aristotle’s Metaphysics. Her project has two main goals: first, to develop and defend a novel interpretation of Aristotle’s priority in being. Taylor argues that in order to understand priority in being, we need to appreciate, and further develop, the link that Aristotle and his predecessors saw between Being and Oneness. Once we do this, we can see that priority in being should be understood in terms of oneness: things are prior which are one independently of others, whereas things are posterior whose being one depends on other things being one. But, being one is not all there is to being, and priority in being is not Aristotle’s only important sense of priority: so, the second goal is to explore how priority in being intersects with priority in account. These two kinds of priority work together to fully explain what it is to be: to be is to be one, on the one hand, and to have an essence or account, on the other. Taylor has recently given two talks on topics from her dissertation: “The Interplay of Priority in Ousia and Priority in Logos” at Philosophizing with the Greats (Oxford, March 2022), and “The Relation(s) of Sameness and Difference in Metaphysics 7, 6” at the summer school on the Metaphysics of Relations in Lugano, June 2022.
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Vicente Lusitano: The missing “Luso African“ composer
Vicente Lusitano was a renowned composer and music theorist of the 16th century. He was born in Olivença, at the time a small Portuguese town. He benefited from musical training from an early age by private teachers who had a close connection with the bishopric and with the bishop himself. This fact led him to be recommended to D. Afonso de Lencastre, Portuguese ambassador to the Holy See, in Italy. In Rome he found recognition as a teacher, theorist, and musician, and was ordained a priest. He later converts to Protestantism and marries, emigrating to Germany, where he ends up in financial decline and without a residence permit, and where his trace disappears, probably at the hands of the Inquisition.
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