What might strike some as Arden of Faversham’s faulty construction may perhaps be ascribed to the fact that Arden’s murderers, as well as the play’s audience, had to learn how to “temper poison” (i.229). Poison is not simply a means to commit murder, its use also requires great dexterity, one which must be interpreted within a historical and metat…[Read more]

What might strike some as Arden of Faversham’s faulty construction may perhaps be ascribed to the fact that Arden’s murderers, as well as the play’s audience, had to learn how to “temper poison” (i.229). Poison is not simply a means to commit murder, its use also requires great dexterity, one which must be interpreted within a historical and metat…[Read more]

Kinds of unity, modes of union—why bother? Does Leibniz ever focus on “union”, anyway? It is not before 1713 that Leibniz gets rid of certain metaphysical concerns which, although secondary for him, were present to his mind since the time of his 1708 answer to Tournemine, who had bespoken a “real union” between the soul and the body (GP VI, 595-9…[Read more]

La Vie Monseigneur Saint Fiacre, one of two medieval French plays featuring the misogynistic horticulturalist, has come down to us in a mildly puzzling form, as a saint play with an interpolated farce. While the text indicates that the farce was intended to be played as an integral part of the performance, it is in fact quite unrelated to the…[Read more]

How might the work on gender in Twelfth Night be challenged by trans theory, narratives, and experience?

Covering the changes in Shakespeare editorial theory and practice over the decades between the publication of the Oxford Shakespeare (1986) and the New Oxford Shakespeare (2016), this article surveys a range of modern texts with different rationales and aimed at different readerships. The article has three sections: the imagery associated with…[Read more]

This study of Leibniz’s philosophical views on mathematics starts from the rank he assigned to them in the encyclopedia of knowledge. Mathematics, in many Leibnitian writings, is proposed to other disciplines as an example to follow: they are an essential component of the new, at the same time encyclopaedic and demonstrative knowledge he is…[Read more]

Leibniz was undoubtedly a many-sided man, and a polymathic mind, if ever there was one. The concept of analysis is notoriously, for its part, a polycephalous monster, and nearly all its meanings are spread through Leibniz’s works, in juridical, scientific, mathematical, or philosophical contexts, under different conditions and with different p…[Read more]

In Castile, where the purity of blood supposedly did not allow the merchants access to the privileged, we found an extremely powerful and rich group, the Cargadores a Indias. This group was made up of international merchants, almost all from humble origins, in many cases converso, who rose socially in a vertiginous way. For this, they were…[Read more]

On 16 November 1436, Enea Silvio Piccolomini delivered the oration Audivi to the fathers of the Council of Basel, concerning the venue for the Union Council between the Latin Church and the Greek Church. He argued for the City of Pavia in the territory of the Duke of Milan. The oration reflected the tensions between conciliarism and the Papacy,…[Read more]

The foreword (here in pre-print version) introduces the scope of this special issue, that is, a re-interpretation of the development of 18th-century German philosophy. We aim in particular at identifying naturalistic and ‘scientific’ tendencies, which evolved alongside the well-studied mainstream currents. In our view, this long-overshadowed man…[Read more]

A plea for more generous modes of reading each other’s scholarship in order to arrive at a University that values productive dissensus within a framework of shared endeavor and solidarity. The essay also argues for new relational modes in which personal, professional and other identities would be rejected in favor of cruising each other’s thought and work.

An overview of the “state of the field” of critical post/humanist studies that also argues for the important intervention of premodern studies into contemporary post/humanist studies, and which serves as the Introduction (with chapter summaries) to “Fragments for a History of a Vanishing Humanism,” eds. Myra Seaman and Eileen A. Joy (Ohio State…[Read more]

André de la Vigne (1470?-1526?) in the manuscript of his “Mystère de Saint Martin,” performed in the town of Seurre in October 1496, also included a “moralité” and a “farce.” Although they are positioned at the conclusion of the “mystère,” these short plays were undoubtedly integral to the larger performance. At the same time they are via…[Read more]

André de la Vigne (1470?-1526?) in the manuscript of his “Mystère de Saint Martin,” performed in the town of Seurre in October 1496, also included a “moralité” and a “farce.” Although they are positioned at the conclusion of the “mystère,” these short plays were undoubtedly integral to the larger performance. At the same time they are via…[Read more]

Did it all begin with Tschirnhaus? This paper (here in pre-print version) discusses the exemplary role that Tschirnhaus could play in the reconstruction of an empirically oriented, scientific, somewhat radical and variously unorthodox current in 18th-century German philosophy, starting from 18th-century characterizations of his intellectual image.

From Spanish and Portuguese travelers to Maupertuis, the problem of albinos, or ‘white Negroes’, as they would be called, has been an epitome of strangeness, a disturbing and/or marvelous appendix to human essence, and has often been instrumental to various definitions of identity. Some major historical and cultural episodes concerning the int…[Read more]

Descartes’ Regulae are the first text in which the idea of ​​a universal mathematics is put in connection with algebra. Young Descartes thinks of geometrical figures as a representation of algebraic procedures so as to guarantee its feasibility: i.e., an epistemological foundation of analysis. The young Leibniz starts from a similar problem. He…[Read more]

The role of insensible appetitions (similar to insensible perceptions, or petites perceptions) in Leibniz’s theory of appetite and will is sketched. Since such insensible appetitions are the medium of interaction, through the body, between the individual and the physical world, and the form in which, at a microscopic level, environmental…[Read more]

IL REALE E L’IMMAGINARIO. Critica dell’infinito e dell’infinitesimo. Continuo reale e ideale. La metafisica del calcolo. Immaginario e immaginazione. Bibliografia