Origin
This book results from work conducted as part of the erc-2013-CoG 615045 project on “Medieval Philosophy in Modern History of Philosophy (memophi)” hosted by the Albert-Ludwigs Universität Freiburg im Breisgau. I thus wish to thank, first and foremost, my colleagues Mario Meliadò and Zornitsa Radeva for their intellectual finesse, thoroughness, and commitment. In 2014 I and a few colleagues in the Upper Rhine region – including Nadja Germann and Silvia Negri in Freiburg, Gianluca Briguglia and Isabel Iribarren in Strasbourg, and Ueli Zahnd in Basel – set up a working group called “Conceptions of Medieval Thought” (cometh). Though all from a mediaevalist background, we had developed interests extending beyond this field to embrace Arabic philosophy, Protestant theology and historiography, the intellectual history of the church, political philosophy, and, in my case, eighteenth- and nineteenth-centuries ideas about the history of philosophy. In keeping with its function as a mediator or medium, the Middle Ages, with no frontiers to speak of, had led us to varied fields. In March 2018, thanks to an invitation from the ehess, I discussed the topics I broach in the following pages before various audiences, particularly researchers working on the modern period. I was able to refine my theses and ideas thanks to Étienne Anheim and Sylvain Piron, who had extended the invitation, and to the other researchers who welcomed me in their seminars – Béatrice Delaurenti, Bruno Karsenti, Maurice Kriegel, Anne Lafont, Antoine Lilti, and Jean-Frédéric Schaub. It remains for me to thank those whose invitation to present my research and explore new lines of enquiry enabled me to write these pages about the history of modern philosophy as an intellectual practice and academic discipline: Julie Brumberg-Chaumont, Alain de Libera, and Antonella Romano, as part of the “Europe of logic” project; Wolf Feuerhahn, and Rafael Mandressi at the Centre Alexandre Koyré; Anne Eusterschulte at the Freie Universität in Berlin; Rolf Elberfeld in Hildesheim; Janette Friedrich and Laurent Cesalli in Geneva; Delphine Antoine-Mahut in Lyon; and Henrike Manuwald and Frank Rexroth in Göttingen; as well as all my medievalist friends.
Freiburg im Breisgau, 30 July 2019