Conferences and Meetings

I strongly believe that academia is a collective job: no single individual can grasp the stratified complexity and intertwining of issues that define the history of philosophy. This is why meetings are crucial to foster our knowledge and test our hypotheses and assumptions – and they are also a lot of fun! The following is a list of conferences, panels, and research meetings I have organised often in collaboration with friends and colleagues.

Conferences and workshops

Trasformare la materia
Org. with Grégory Clesse. Università di Messina (IT), 28–29 April 2026. Website

What does it mean for matter to change? This question lies at the centre of medieval natural philosophy, but it was never confined to a single field. Questions of material transformation were addressed in medieval metaphysics, medicine, alchemy, logic, and the study of animals, often with different methods and different conclusions. This workshop brings those perspectives into dialogue. Trasformare la materia is a joint initiative of the University of Messina and UC Louvain, co-organised by Nicola Polloni and Grégory Clesse. It brings together specialists working across different areas of medieval thought to examine how the concept of matter, its nature, its capacities, and its limits, was articulated, contested, and transformed in texts ranging from Aristotelian commentaries to alchemical treatises, from medical compendia to logical analyses of change.

Glimpses of the Invisible: Visualising the Principles of Nature before the Rise of Modernity
Org. with Serena Masolini. Universidad de Córdoba (ES) and Università di Messina (IT), 28–29 November 2024. Website

Glimpses of the Invisible: Visualising the Principles of Nature Before the Rise of Modernity is a workshop devoted to the ways premodern philosophy and science represented unperceivable entities and principles underlying the natural world. Focusing on materials such as diagrams, charts, schemes, and illuminations, it explores how visual forms were used to articulate concepts including elements, atoms, corpuscles, celestial structures, and onto-cosmological principles in different linguistic and cultural traditions. The workshop aims to show that visual representation did more than clarify theories: it often shaped later developments in ontology, natural philosophy, and science by influencing how such entities were conceived and interpreted.

From Toledo to Gotha: New Perspectives on the Impact of Avicenna Upon Sciences and Philosophy in Europe
Org. with Cécile Bonmariage, Sébastien Moureau, and Andrea Aldo Robiglio. KU Leuven and UC Louvain (BE), 15–16 October 2022. Website

From Toledo to Gotha: New Perspectives on the Impact of Avicenna upon Sciences and Philosophy in Europe is a conference devoted to the transmission, reception, and transformation of Avicenna’s thought in the Latin West from the twelfth century to the early modern period. Adopting a longue-durée and interlinguistic perspective, it explores Avicenna’s influence on metaphysics, natural philosophy, medicine, and scholastic debate, while also addressing the material circulation of his works and their later interpretation in Renaissance and scientific contexts. The conference aims to reassess the scope and character of the Avicenna Latinus within the broader history of European philosophy and science.

Late Medieval Hylomorphism: Matter and Form, 1300–1600
Org. with Russel Friedman and Zita Toth. KU Leuven (BE), 9–11 June 2022. Website

Late Medieval Hylomorphism: Matter and Form, 1300-1600 brings into focus the long and still insufficiently explored history of hylomorphic debate from the fourteenth to the seventeenth century. The conference investigates how later medieval and early modern thinkers reworked central questions concerning prime matter, substantial form, plurality of forms, substantial change, celestial and sublunary matter, and the knowability of hylomorphic principles. By tracing both continuities and fresh departures across this extended period, it seeks to clarify the range, durability, and originality of post-thirteenth-century reflection on matter and form.

Divergent Scholasticism: Philosophical Thought and Scholastic Tradition Between Europe and the Americas, 1500–1700
Org. with Abel Aravena Zamora and Christophe Geudens. KU Leuven (BE) and Universidad de Playa Ancha (CL), March to October 2022. Website

Divergent Scholasticism: Philosophical Thought and Scholastic Tradition Between Europe and the Americas, 1500-1700 is a cycle of conferences devoted to the multiple trajectories of Second Scholasticism across the Atlantic world. Challenging narratives of a simple break between medieval scholasticism and early modern thought, it examines continuities, transformations, and local reconfigurations in fields such as logic, metaphysics, natural philosophy, medicine, theology, law, and pedagogy. With particular attention to Latin America, the programme seeks to recover the plural and geographically extended character of scholastic debate in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Hylomorphism Into Pieces: Elements, Atoms and Corpuscles in the Late Middle Ages (1400–1600)
Org. with Sylvain Roudaut. Stockholms Universitet (SE) and KU Leuven (BE), 7–8 April 2022. Website

Hylomorphism into Pieces: Elements, Atoms, and Corpuscles in the Late Middle Ages examines the gradual erosion of hylomorphic explanation between the late fourteenth and the sixteenth centuries. Rather than treating the decline of Aristotelian matter and form as a sudden early modern rupture, the conference traces the intermediate stages through which atomism, corpuscular accounts, minima naturalia, and new conceptions of elemental composition reshaped older scholastic frameworks. Its central concern is the changing vocabulary of matter and the ways in which late medieval and Renaissance thinkers negotiated the passage from hylomorphic to increasingly particulate models of nature.

Materia, 气/Qì, and Their Epistemes
Org. with Shixiang Jin. KU Leuven (BE) and USTB Beijing (CN), 10–11 December 2021. Website

Materia, 气/Qì, and Their Epistemes is a comparative workshop on the concepts and intellectual histories of materiality in premodern Europe and China. Placing scholastic accounts of materia alongside Chinese reflections on qi and li, it investigates how different traditions theorised the substrate of the natural world across philosophy, science, medicine, and related practices. The event is especially concerned with the plurality of epistemic frameworks through which material principles were understood, and with the methodological promises and difficulties of comparative work in the history of philosophy.

The Elusive Substrate: Prime Matter and Hylomorphism from Ancient Rome to Early Qing China
KU Leuven (BE), 14 May 2021 – 18 March 2022. Website

The Elusive Substrate: Prime Matter and Hylomorphism from Ancient Rome to Early Qing China is a cycle of conferences tracing the long history of prime matter as a concept in metaphysics and natural philosophy. Centered on the Latin tradition yet extending into cross-cultural contexts, it follows the changing fortunes of hylomorphic thought from antiquity through the medieval and early modern periods, while also considering its transmission beyond Europe, especially to China and Latin America. The initiative is designed to reconstruct, through a series of historically distinct phases and case studies, the evolving theories, problems, and reinterpretations surrounding the material substrate of the universe.

Prime Matter: The Ontological Stakes of Physical Endurance
Humboldt Universität zu Berlin (DE), 28 February 2020. Website

Prime Matter: The Ontological Stakes of Physical Endurance is to the problem of prime matter within the hylomorphic understanding of nature. Bringing together perspectives from ancient, medieval, and early modern philosophy and science, it explores why thinkers insisted on positing a material substrate underlying natural change and what ontological commitments followed from that move. The programme thus approaches prime matter as a crucial testing ground for broader questions about change, persistence, and the constitution of physical reality.

Matters Entagled: An Early-Career Symposium on History and Philosophy
Org. with Elena Băltuță. Humboldt Universität zu Berlin (DE), 12 July 2019. Website

Matters Entangled: An Early Career Workshop on History and Philosophy is a one-day event centered on premodern philosophy through a broad comparative lens. Bringing together early career researchers working on European, Islamic, and Indian traditions, it uses a series of case studies to revisit major questions in the history of philosophy and to test fresh interpretive approaches to long-standing problems. The workshop is conceived as an open forum for emerging scholarship and cross-traditional dialogue.

Translating Experience: Medieval Encounters with Nature, Self, and God
Org. with Katja Krause. Durham University (UK), 4–6 June 2017. Website

Translating Experience: Medieval Encounters with Nature, Self, and God is a conference devoted to the many roles played by experience in medieval thought across natural philosophy, medicine, alchemy, epistemology, introspection, and religious discourse. By treating experience both as a tool of knowledge and as an object of reflection, the event investigates how medieval thinkers understood its functions in different domains. A central concern is the idea of translation itself: conceptual, linguistic, and material processes through which experience was rendered across languages, traditions, and textual forms.

Da Stagira a Parigi: prospettive aristoteliche tra Antichità e Medioevo
Org. with Chiara Blengini, Silvia Gastaldi, and Cesare Zizza. Università di Pavia (IT), 30–31 May 2016. Website

Da Stagira a Parigi: Prospettive aristoteliche tra antichità e medioevo è un convegno dedicato alla storia dell’aristotelismo e alla pluralità delle sue forme speculative. Muovendo dalla prima ricezione delle opere di Aristotele nel mondo antico, l’iniziativa segue gli sviluppi delle tradizioni greca, araba e latina, ricostruendo alcuni dei principali snodi attraverso cui l’aristotelismo si trasmette, si trasforma e si riarticola nel Medioevo. Il convegno si propone così di offrire una visione ampia e stratificata della fortuna di Aristotele tra antichità e cultura medievale.

Idee, testi e autori arabi ed ebraici e la loro ricezione latina
Università di Pavia (IT), 3–4 December 2014. Website

Idee, testi e autori arabi ed ebraici e la loro ricezione latina è un convegno dedicato agli scambi intellettuali tra le tradizioni araba, ebraica e latina nel Medioevo, con particolare attenzione alla trasmissione di idee e dottrine filosofiche. Muovendosi entro il vasto spazio mediterraneo ed europeo in cui queste culture si intrecciano, l’iniziativa intende mostrare il ruolo decisivo svolto dalla riflessione araba ed ebraica nella formazione e nello sviluppo del pensiero filosofico latino medievale.

Pensare a Weimar: Figure del pensiero tedesco nella Germania della crisi
Org. with Luca De Giovanni. Università di Pavia (IT), 10–12 December 2013. Website

Pensare a Weimar: Figure del pensiero tedesco nella Germania della crisi è un convegno dedicato alle principali figure della cultura filosofica tedesca nel contesto della Repubblica di Weimar e della crisi che ne segna gli anni conclusivi. L’iniziativa intende ricostruire criticamente il profilo di autori come Jaeger, Jaspers, Husserl, Heidegger, Weber e Löwith, collocandoli entro le tensioni politiche, culturali e intellettuali del periodo, e considerando anche le successive letture e contestazioni rivolte alla loro eredità nel pensiero del Novecento.

Seminars and research meetings

Seminari di Filosofia Medievale 2026
Research seminar, Università di Messina (IT), February to May 2026. Website

I Seminari di Filosofia Medievale dell’Università di Messina offrono uno spazio di confronto aperto su temi, autori e problemi centrali della riflessione medievale, considerata nella ricchezza delle sue articolazioni storiche e teoriche. Il ciclo di quest’anno affronta questioni diverse ma tra loro profondamente connesse, tra cui il ruolo delle traduzioni medievali nella circolazione del sapere, la specificità filosofica del dodicesimo secolo, il rapporto tra Machiavelli e la continuità fra Medioevo e Rinascimento, Maimonide e la storia della sua ricezione, nonché le difficoltà e le responsabilità implicate nel narrare la filosofia medievale nei manuali universitari. Nel loro insieme, i seminari intendono mostrare come la filosofia medievale costituisca un campo dinamico, plurale e ancora decisivo per comprendere la storia della filosofia europea e mediterranea.

2026 Global Scholasticism Lecture Series
Org. with Abel Aravena Zamora and Lu Jiang. January to December 2026. Website

The 2026 Global Scholasticism Lecture Series is an international academic programme dedicated to the study of scholastic thought across medieval, early modern, and global contexts. Its lectures address topics such as the transmission of natural philosophy in China, medieval debates on mind and matter, seventeenth-century logic in colonial Mexico, second scholastic theology, the reception of Aquinas in Japan, Suárez on human action, and the circulation of scholastic ideas in the early modern world.

Riflessione filosofica e pratica scientifica nel Medioevo
Research seminar, Università di Messina (IT), February to May 2025. Website

Il ciclo di incontri Riflessione filosofica e pratica scientifica nel Medioevo sviluppa uno dei temi più affascinanti e rilevanti della storia intellettuale medievale: l’intreccio tematico e dottrinale tra filosofia e saperi scientifici. Con un approccio interdisciplinare, gli incontri offrono spazi di discussione e analisi sulla stretta relazione tra questi due ambiti nel corso del Medioevo latino, greco e arabo-ebraico. In questo senso, il ciclo seminariale si propone come un’occasione di approfondimento della ricchezza e complessità del discorso medievale sulla natura, focalizzandosi su problemi e questioni specifiche in cui l’intreccio tra filosofia e scienza ha forti implicazioni per entrambe le discipline.

Medieval Logic and Ontology (MeLO) Seminar
Org. with Christophe Geudens. Research colloquium, KU Leuven (BE), January to September 2021. Website

The Medieval Logic and Ontology Seminar (MeLO) is an online colloquium devoted to research on logic and ontology from roughly 500 to 1700. Conceived especially as a forum for early career scholars, it offers a space for presenting ongoing work either through papers or discussions of pre-circulated drafts, followed by focused collective debate. By fostering regular exchange across a wide chronological range, the seminar encourages sustained reflection on problems, methods, and texts central to medieval and early modern philosophical inquiry.

Nature and Emergence: A Research Reading Group on Samuel Alexander
Org. with Alexander Blum, Dominic Dold, and Núria Muñoz-Garganté. Research reading group, KU Leuven, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, and Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (MPIWG), Berlin (DE) and Leuven (BE). March 2020 to April 2021. Website

Nature and Emergence: A Reading Group of Samuel Alexander’s Space, Time, and Deity is a research seminar devoted to a sustained collective reading of Alexander’s major philosophical work. Organised as a biweekly discussion group, it follows the four books of the text while engaging selected secondary literature on categories, space and time, emergentism, mind, and deity. The initiative provides a focused setting for collaborative reflection on one of the key philosophical attempts to think emergence, order, and reality as parts of a single speculative system.

Medieval Philosophical Gatherings II
Weekly research colloquium, Humboldt Universität zu Berlin (DE), October to December 2019. Website

Medieval Philosophical Gatherings II is a weekly colloquium devoted to advanced topics in medieval philosophy, with a particular emphasis on providing a platform for younger scholars from a range of international institutions. Hosted at Humboldt University in Berlin, the series brings together research on figures and problems spanning scholasticism, Arabic philosophy, and the medieval afterlife of ancient thought, fostering sustained discussion in an open and informal setting.

Medieval Philosophical Gatherings I
Weekly research colloquium, Humboldt Universität zu Berlin (DE), April to July 2019. Website

Medieval Philosophical Gatherings I is a colloquium conceived as an open space for discussing major questions in medieval philosophy through the work of emerging scholars. Held at Humboldt University in Berlin, the series explores a range of topics including Avicenna’s reception, Roger Bacon, Aquinas, medieval science, and colonial scholastic teaching, with the aim of revisiting familiar debates from fresh angles and encouraging regular scholarly exchange.

Panels

Natural Entanglements: Confused Perceptions in the Middle Ages
2023 International Medieval Congress. Leeds (UK), 3–6 July 2023. Website

According to medieval Aristotelianism, knowledge starts from the senses and evolves through a chain of cognitive processes. Through perception, humans can access the world, make claims about its nature, and ponder about its unperceivable structures. This panel delves into peculiar types of perceptions and perceptual puzzles in medieval epistemology. The first paper discusses the kind of perceptions we have in dreams and delusional dreams (e.g., dreamless nights, nightmares, sleepwalking), which challenges the boundaries between fiction and reality. The second paper expands on the use of fringe perceptive cases (e.g., listening to silence, seeing darkness) to conceive ontological principles that cannot be seen or touched, such as prime matter. Finally, the third paper expands on the medieval understanding of intentionality by questioning the nature of the “species” considered as a case-study to explore the intricate relations among what is physical, spiritual, and intentional in the Middle Ages.

Hylomorphism in the Later Middle Ages: Contrasting Perspectives
2022 SIEPM Congress. Paris (FR), 22–26 August 2022. Website

The panel delves into the hylomorphic debate from the 13th and 14th centuries. Engaging with how hylomorphism was discussed in different philosophical domains (natural philosophy, psychology, and metaphysics), the three papers engage with relevant aspects of the problematic deployment of this theory as central explanatory device in medieval philosophy. Serena Masolini will expand on the hypothesis that matter is always accompanied by active potencies, which led 13th-century English natural philosophers to establish a crucial distinction between prime and natural matter. Virginia Scribanti’s paper will deal with another instantiation of hylomorphism, this time in consideration of the constitution of the human being in terms of body and soul. Focusing her attention on William of Alnwick, Scribanti will examine the originality of Alnwick’s theory of the unity of the human compound. Finally, Russell Friedman’s paper will engage with John of Jandun’s theory of prime matter. Like Alnwick, with Jandun, too, a main role is played by Averroes and his great impact on the Latinate discussion of hylomorphism. Expanding on Jandun’s theory of the potency of prime matter, Friedman will discuss both justifications and implications of this theory in the broader context of the 14th-century debate on matter. As a whole, the panel will dissect some of the most problematic issues arising from hylomorphism as they were discussed in the later Middle Ages. The panel is organically connected to the second proposed session on hylomorphism, which will focus on a later phase in the history of hylomorphism.

Cross-Pollinations and Creative Interpretations: The Place of Toledo in the History of European Philosophy
Conference: The Multi-Ethnic Borderlands of Medieval Toledo: New Directions. Toledo (ES), 5–7 June 2019. Website

The panel delves into the cross-cultural environment that nurtured Toledo during the Middle Ages and expands into the philosophical outcomes of that unique blending of expertise, cultures, and languages. By focusing on four crucial case studies, the panel touches upon some of the most important theories and authors which, connected to Toledo either directly or indirectly, would profoundly and drastically impact on the European philosophical tradition.

Pre-Modern Experiences and the Limits of Science
2017 Meeting of the History of Science Society. Toronto, (CA), 9–12 November 2017. Website

Our knowing is limited by physical and cognitive boundaries such as corporeal matter, individual particularity, natural exceptionality, and human reason. The history of science may be viewed as the progressive evasion of these limits through the formulation of theories and the creation of speculative and technical instruments that made possible a deep comprehension of reality that regularly transcended the reaches of sense experience and reason. This panel presents four examples of how, in the pre-modern period, a progressive liberation from the limits of knowing laid the basis for the emancipation of different disciplines and inventions. At the same time, the continuity of questions on the limits of experience, knowledge, and science is accompanied by processes of discontinuity or even fracture in dense histories of opposing paradigms, contrasting perspectives, and tacit revolutions paving the road to the trailblazing developments which ranged from the telescope and the microscope to the discovery of new life worlds in the Americas and East Asia.

Skills development workshops

Shaping Philosophical Research into Doctoral Projects
KU Leuven (BE), 4 February 2026. Website

The workshop explores various approaches to conceptualising, shaping, and crafting new research projects within the expansive domain of philosophy and its historical development. Adopting a hands-on approach, participants will engage directly with research design using a dedicated worksheet, available for download. These materials will be distributed to all participants and will serve as the basis for a day-long discussion throughout the workshop. Each session will critically address the core requirements of funding bodies (especially the FWO), organisations, and individual academic institutions, offering participants a comprehensive understanding of how to structure a successful research proposal.

Crafting Doctoral Projects in Philosophy
KU Leuven (BE), 6 February 2025. Website

The workshop examines different ways of conceiving, developing, and articulating new research projects within the broad field of philosophy and its history. Designed in a practical format, it invites participants to work directly on project design through a dedicated worksheet, which can be downloaded using the button below. The worksheet will be shared with all participants and will provide the framework for discussion across the day. Throughout the workshop, each session will focus on key expectations commonly set by funding agencies, particularly the FWO, as well as by research organisations and academic institutions, with the aim of helping participants understand how to build a strong and persuasive research proposal.

Envisioning and Designing New Research in Philosophy
KU Leuven (BE), 9 February 2024. Website

The workshop discusses different strategies to envision the planning, tailoring, and designing of new research projects in the broad field of philosophy and its historical course. Each session offers a critique of academia by engaging directly with the main requirements of funding schemes, European institutions, and individual universities. Participants should expect a reasonable amount of realism and be ready for their idealistic plans to be shattered and largely disrupted by their hands-on encounter with the reality of present-day research in philosophy that the workshop will provide.

Project Design for Philosophical Research
KU Leuven (BE), 4 February 2023. Website

Project Design for Philosophical Research: A Hands-on Workshop is a practical event devoted to the preparation of research proposals in philosophy. Building on themes discussed in the KU Leuven Common Seminar, the workshop focuses on the structure of proposals, their most difficult sections, and the role of persuasive argument in academic project design. Through a dedicated worksheet and a peer-review exercise based on participants’ draft proposals, the workshop aims to foster a more critical and reflective understanding of how to formulate strong, coherent, and competitive research applications.