Research Team:
Mihnea Dobre (Principal Investigator) is teaching and doing research at the University of Bucharest. He has a PhD in philosophy (Radboud University Nijmegen and University of Bucharest), and his research interest is in the history of philosophy and science. He works on the various aspects of the early modern period, with a focus on the relations between philosophy, science, and religion. He is the author of a monograph on Descartes and Early French Cartesianism: between metaphysics and physics (Zeta Books, 2017) and co-editor of the Cartesian Empiricisms volume (Springer, 2013). For a list of Dobre’s publications and conference papers, see his page. He is book review editor at the Centaurus, An International Journal of the History of Science and its Cultural Aspects. Dobre is the PI of this project. Contact: mihnea.dobre@unibuc.ro.
Grigore Vida is a historian of the philosophy and science of the early modern period, member of the Research Center “Foundations of Modern Thought” and of the Center for Logic, History and Philosophy of Science (both at the University of Bucharest). He has a PhD in philosophy from the University of Bucharest with the thesis Metaphysics and Natural Philosophy in Isaac Newton (2011). He has worked within a team on a Romanian edition of Descartes’ complete correspondence, and has also contributed to translations from the works of Francis Bacon. His main interest is the relation between metaphysics, natural philosophy and mathematics in the works of scientifically minded philosophers of the 17th century. In this project, Vida will prepare a critical edition and a Romanian translation of the Leibniz-Clarke correspondence. Contact: grigore.vida@icub.unibuc.ro.
Ovidiu Babeș is PhD student at the Faculty of Philosophy, University of Bucharest, writing a dissertation on the relation between mathematics and natural philosophy in Descartes’s works. His main area of research interest is in the history of early modern science (including here natural philosophy, history of mathematics, the rise of experimental philosophy). He has worked on topics such as early modern doctrines of demonstration, the status of mixed-mathematical disciplines within the Aristotelian division of sciences, Descartes’s optics and mechanics, the establishment of the Royal Society, and John Wilkins’s cosmology. In this project, he will deal with the late seventeenth-early eighteenth century English reception of Descartes's vortex theory. Contact: ovidiu.babes@icub.unibuc.ro.
Ioana Bujor is a PhD student at the Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literatures, University of Bucharest. For her doctoral dissertation she is working on a translation (from Latin into Romanian) of Baruch Spinoza’s Compendium Grammatices Linguae Hebraeae, focusing on the implications of Hebrew language in Spinoza's thought. She has previously worked on the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, dealing with translation or interpretation of some key-chapters concerning hermeneutics of the Bible. Her primary research interests include early modern philosophy, philosophy of religion, Biblical exegesis, and Jewish philosophy. In this project, she will take a look at Antoine Le Grande's annotated version of Rohault.
Contact: ioana.bujor@lls.unibuc.ro.