Activities

July 2023

The philosophy of Ian Hacking
with Matteo Vagelli - presentation of "Anthropologie philosophique et raison scientifique" (Vrin 2023) by Ian Hacking.
See "La philosophie de Ian Hacking, avec Matteo Vagelli" [FRA] video.

20/02/2023

Stylistic Pluralism and its Discontents
Egenis Seminar (University of Exeter)

One of the “pluralisms” that proliferated in Anglophone philosophy of science during the second half of the twentieth century involves conceiving of the history of science as a history of “scientific styles”. Conflicting interpretations of “styles” in science mainly concern whether the term implies abandonment of the realism, objectivity, and progressiveness commonly understood to distinguish science from the arts.
Taking stock of these debates, in my presentation I aim to discuss the notion of “stylistic pluralism” in relation to some of the forms of ontological, epistemological and methodological pluralism mentioned above. In the first part of my talk, I will build on Ian Hacking’s theory of “styles of scientific reasoning” (Hacking 1982, 1992, 2012) and analyze some of its shortcomings. As a second step, I aim to improve Hacking’s notion of styles by integrating insights from Hasok Chang’s notion of “systems of practice”, considered in the more general framework of his “active normative epistemic pluralism.” (Chang 2012) The notion of “stylistic pluralism”, thus reworked, should allow us to recognize the advances associated with the pluralist turn without falling into the relativism and constructivism it is often taken to imply.
See  "Stylistic Pluralism and Its Discontents" video.

Roundtable discussion, Harvard University

Participants: Hasok Chang (Cambridge), Alex Csiszar (Harvard), Peter Galison (Harvard), Eleonora Montuschi (Ca’ Foscari)
Chair: Matteo Vagelli (Ca’ Foscari/Harvard)
Discussions of pluralism, objectivity, and styles in science are intimately intertwined, while the question of whether something can be learned from this entwinement remains open. The conversation of the panel will discuss these intersections in light of recent theoretical developments.

This online seminar discusses the idea of the plurality and historicity of styles in connection with formalist approaches to perception of German art historians and French philosophers between the second half of the 19th century and the first decades of the 20th.
The aim of the seminar is to assess how such discussions became the backdrop for many subsequent uses of style by 20th historians and philosophers of science.

Flyer "Styles in the Arts and in the Sciences", Fall 2022 - Winter 2023

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Abstracts

17/10/2022 - Isabelle Kalinowski, ENS Paris
Gottfried Semper: Style and the Thickness of Time

In the 1830s, German architect Gottfried Semper (1803–1879) took part in the historical movement of rediscovery of ancient architectural polychromy. His main interest, however, was not limited to demonstrating the historical existence of polychromy: he wanted to explain the function of color and to find an interpretation of the décor’s necessity. He argued that polychromy has essentially to do with memory: the colored décor is a reminiscence of an origin which is more structural than strictly historical. The elements of décor are always linked to something which is remembered: not only to an event in the people’s history, or to a symbolic value, but to the memory of architecture itself. It refers to another material. From the end of the 1840s onward, Semper identifies this architectural memory as a reminiscence of “textile.” In his major work, Style (1860–1863), he refines his conception of genealogy: according to him, the process of material metamorphosis accounts for the agency of architecture. In this lecture, I will explore Semper’s theory of style as material memory as well as the function of Stoffwechsel (metabolism) or migration from one material technique to another in its discontinuity and nomadic history. 

24/10/2022 - Rémi Mermet, ENS Paris
Beyond formalism: Heinrich Wölfflin’s concept of style

Swiss-German art historian Heinrich Wölfflin (1864-1945) is usually considered, along with Alois Riegl, Aby Warburg and Erwin Panofsky, to be one of the founding fathers of scientific art history (Kunstwissenschaft) in the early 20th century. His Principles of Art History, published in 1915, has been one of the most influential books in the history of the discipline. Yet, despite the recent celebration of the centenary of its publication, and its retranslation into English by the Getty Research Institute, this work still triggers strong opposition within the art-historical community: for a century, Wölfflin’s book has regularly been criticized for his so-called “formalist” approach to artistic styles—an approach that is generally deemed to be blind to the social, political and ideological context of the creation of the works of art. Against such interpretations, I aim to show that Wölfflin’s formalism is merely “tactical”. In the Principles of Art History, he turns away from the analysis of the content of the works to better grasp the inherent meaning of their form. His definition of style as Sehform (“form of seeing”), which owes much to the legacy of Goethe’s morphology, does not separate form and meaning, but apprehends form as the manifestation of meaning itself.

31/10/2022 - Andrea Pinotti, University of Milan
Style in art and style in perception: a problematic correlation

The German-speaking “Kunstwissenschaft” around the turn of the century (Riegl, Wölfflin and others) put forward a theory of style which suggested, although in an ambiguous way, a connection between styles of visual representation and styles of perception. Such “aisthesiological” approach found in Walter Benjamin and Erwin Panofsky two opposite interpretations: while the latter strongly opposed that connection, the former welcomed it and further articulated it in the direction of the notion of the historical character of perception. My paper will address this controversial constellation, following its successive developments in contemporary aesthetics (both on the analytic and the continental sides). 

24/01/2023 - Frédéric Fruteau de Laclos, Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne
Epistemological existentialism and stylistic of ideation

Knowledge is deeply anchored in the existence of subjects - it is, as existentialism has it, “situated”. From this "situation", and from what the subject of knowledge makes of it, follows a specific "style" of producing ideas which is always original. This way of understanding things blurs the lines, traditionally distinguished in France, between the subject and the concept, and attempts at extending existentialism to have it covering questions of knowledge, leading it furthermore to analyse how one forms ideas, while forming his or herself as a subject. Symmetrically, I would like to provide a wider understanding of epistemology, one in which the existential conditions for the production of knowledge are taken into account: the subject of knowledge is a subject in the strong sense of the term, and its subjectivity as well as the concrete conditions of its existence must be accounted for epistemologically.
This meeting will exceptionally be held in French, however, it will be possible to participate in the conversation and ask questions in English.

6/02/2023 - Mari Hvattum, Oslo School of Architecture and Design
Style and Solitude. The History of an Architectural Problem

In the late 18th century, style underwent a conceptual transformation from a rhetorical device to a new notion of period style. The German art historian Willibald Sauerländer considered the shift a “fateful moment” in European intellectual history, describing the new notion of style as an “ambivalent hermeneutical construct” corresponding to an “alienated attitude towards the arts of the past.” Taking Sauerländer’s critique as a point of departure, this lecture queries the period style and its effect on 19th century architecture. Yet there is a twist. For, however profound those effects were, the period style was not the only notion of style at work in historicist architectural thinking. Looking particularly at Carl Friedrich von Rumohr and Gottfried Semper, I look at conflicting notions of style at work in architectural discourse and practice of the early 19th century.

13/02/2023 - Eva Geulen, ZfL Berlin
Why Style Now?

20/02/2023 - Johannes Endres, ZfL Berlin
“Style” in an Interdisciplinary Perspective

Today, “style” is a rubbery word that can mean almost anything in just about any context. That used to be different, from its origin in ancient rhetoric, through its rediscovery in the Italian Renaissance and the concept's advent as a technical term in art history in the eighteenth century, all the way to it reconceptualization in the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in the fields of literary criticism, philosophy, sociology, the history of science, and beyond. My talk is going to present relevant stages of the history of the concept, offering, at the same time, an overview of major epistemological traits on which its future use as part of an interdisciplinary language for the interpretation of visual and literary works of art could be based.

This seminar explores the hypothesis that a distinctive link between style and ways of thinking was formed between the early modern and the modern periods – one that not only played a specific role in the emergence of philology as a model for knowledge but also in discussions of scientific method.

Flyer "Styles and Method in the Early-Modern and the Modern Period" - April-May 2022

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Abstracts

11/04/2022 - Carlotta Santini, CNRS
Reading well, writing well, living well. Friedrich Nietzsche and the question of style

The reflection on style in Nietzsche's philosophical work cannot be circumscribed to a specific period. It is in fact one of the most important leitmotifs of his œuvre, whose treatment, almost never systematic, is entrusted to anecdotes, mottos and quick remarks. Starting with his first study of the complex artificiality and conventionality of ancient literatures, Nietzsche lays the foundations for his future reflections on philosophical language and the great style. This "dispersed" form, however, in no way diminishes the theoretical weight of the considerations on style and modes of writing in Nietzsche's work. The aesthetic paradigm of the Greek literary work, its rigid formalism and exaggerated normativity to which the entire expressive potential of the artwork was entrusted, increasingly takes the form of an ethical paradigm in Nietzsche's reflection. The "unnatural naturalness" of the great style, the creative freedom within the closed realm of convention, which Nietzsche borrows from the experience of ancient rhetoric, drives him to conceive, through words and writings, an ethics of self-determination, a character-shaping action of stylistic choices. In contrast to the popular view according to which Nietzsche is the philosopher of irrationality, he concentrates all his efforts on the codification of a theory of education and self-control, self-determination, which affects not only writing, but also thinking and character, and thus aspires to achieve radical transformations in the human form of life. 

26/04/2022 - Raz Chen-Morris, Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Fantasy, Scientific Thought and the End of Baroque Science

Since the early phases of the New Science, natural philosophers and mathematicians embraced fantastical stories and imaginary scenarios in order to undermine the traditional and well-entrenched Aritotelian and Ptolemaic systems of the world. Whether in Kepler's Somnium, or Galileo imaginary experiments, or Descartes' fictitious world-system, the assumption was that, in Shakepeare's words, only by "transfiguring" the audience's mind "so together" can a great constancy  grow. This utopian notion that in traveling to another fantastical place one can learn the truth about one's own world pervaded much of 17th century scientific thought in its aspiration to fashion a new world-picture. Beginning with the 1660's, however, the notion of a fantastic travel became leverage for criticizing and exposing the vain presumptuousness of the "New Science". Margaret Cavendish, in her Blazing World, blatantly attacked the Royal Society, mocking its reliance on such instruments as the telescope and the microscope. The Jesuit Gabriel Daniel, in his Voiage du Monde de Descartes, used the trope of space traveling to ridicule the French philosophers' system of the world. Thus, at the end of the 17th century, leading savants such as Fontenelle or Huygens turned to speculate on planetary worlds, marginalizing the role of fantasy and instead seeking to establish a new astronomical and physical commonsense. 

2/05/2022 - entretien avec Denis Kambouchner, Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne
Du style en philosophie, à partir de Descartes

This session focused on the analogies, the shifts and the possible points of contact between the notion of style and that of method. In this framework, what is the role of Descartes’ understanding of method? Is it possible to maintain that style, as a “way of thinking”, finds in Descartes its founding figure? It is Descartes, more than any other modern philosopher before him, to have explicitly linked and bent thought to the need for clarity. Is there a relation between the syntactic architecture of Cartesian language and his thought? To what extent “Descartes’ style” has been taken up and reproduced by others? To what extent is it the mark of a philosophical style which goes well beyond its creator?
In this session we discussed these questions with Denis Kambouchner, one of the most renowned scholars of Descartes and modern philosophy. Professeur émérite at the University Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, he has edited, for Gallimard, the complete works by Descartes, and he is the author of many works on the history of philosophy (e.g. Descartes et la philosophie morale, Hermann, 2001 et Descartes n’a pas dit, Les Belles-Lettres, 2015). Kambouchner is also the author of Le style de Descartes (Manucius, 2013), book which was the point of departure of our conversation, and which allowed us to reflect upon Descartes, the notion of style, as well as the thought of modernity and philosophy more broadly construed.

12/05/2022 - Emilie Passignat, Ca’ Foscari University of Venice
Manner: Connoisseurship and Taxonomy, Individual and Collective Identity

The word "Mannerism" is relatively recent in the vocabulary of art history: it appears in Italy during the first half of the nineteenth century. Though it can be useful to elaborate the periodization of arts, Robert Rosenblum has rightly referred to period markers as “semantic straitjackets”, considering these tools hard to tolerate as well as quite impossible to reject. “Mannerism” has a meaning deeply stigmatized and often pejorative inherited from previous centuries, due to the evolution of the use of the term Maniera in the art theory and criticism. The purpose of this paper is thus to focus on some significant aspects of the history of “Maniera”, by giving some new considerations on this key term of the artistic vocabulary. This will aim to present some reflections on the adoption of the term “Maniera” in the artistic literature of the 16 th Century, to highlight some underlying theoretical problems that have so far been much too neglected. Above all, “Maniera” was intrinsically linked to the notion of imitation and has been particularly involved in the gradual emergence of the concept of school, since its apparent polysemy follows from the declination at different scales of what is specific to the individual and collective artistic identity, in space, in time and in the choice of models.

23/05/2022 - Gianna Pomata, John Hopkins
The unbearable lightness of thinking: theory as "capriccio" in 17th-century medicine

My contribution will focus on a surprising and hitherto unnoticed aspect of early modern epistemology: the fact that the term “capriccio” was used in 17th-century natural philosophy and medicine to indicate conjecture, hypothesis, or theory - in other words, as an antonym for observation. The term conveyed, in this context, a negative view of theory as mere opinion or “fancy”. Indeed, it carried some of the flavor of arbitrariness and unruliness that the word “caprice” was acquiring, in the same years, in the language of political theorists, particularly with the critics of the absolutist state. Right at the same time, in striking contrast, “capriccio” was acquiring a strongly positive currency in the arts. Starting with music in the 16th century, the term “capriccio” was extended to the visual arts and then to literature, to indicate a fashionable multimedia genre associated with liberty of form - “a genre that combined order and chaos”. It appears then that a “capricious” style became fashionable in the arts right when it was being frowned upon in the sciences. What was the meaning of these parallel and contrasting trends? I will argue that the negative meaning of “capriccio” in the sciences indicated:

1. the changing relationship of theory and observation in the 17th century, which strongly privileged observation over theory; 
2. the beginning of a divergence between acceptable styles of thinking in scientific and artistic cultures, which would more fully develop in later periods. 

A 4-session webinar on the historical and philosophical approaches to the study of the natural and the social sciences. Both established and early-career researchers will present their work on biology and medicine, economics, the social sciences, ecology and the history of epistemology.

Flyer 3-10-17-24/11/2021

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