The Spinoza Prize Project

The Spinoza Prize Project (NWO, 2016)

The Spinoza Prize Project is funded by the Spinoza Prize that Lodi Nauta received in September 2016 from the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO). The central aim of the project is to foster research in the transformation of medieval thought into early-modern philosophy and science. It focuses on the slow demise of scholastic Aristotelianism and the rise of modern philosophy and science in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This is a vast field of research. Scholarship of the last decades in particular has shown how complicated this whole process of transformation was. Within this broad historical framework we welcome projects that analyze aspects of this process; positions for postdocs and PhDs are advertized, and research guests will be invited to spend some time in Groningen. The Spinoza Prize project thus enables the Groningen group to deepen and strengthen its research in the history of philosophy and to foster international collaboration. The project is therefore not just one project but will function as an umbrella for new research projects and activities that enlighten our understanding of the slow, complicated and fascinating story of the ways in which medieval legacies affected the shaping of early modern thought. Current projects include causality, teleology and occasionalism (Sangiacomo), Aristotelianism versus the new philosophy in the seventeenth century (Adriaenssen), theories about the mind and its interactions with the world (Lenz); relativism in ancient philosophy (Nawar), de-essentialization and the critique of language (Nauta), the rise of experimental science (Rusu). For information of current projects see the website of the Centre. Several PhDs work on related themes.