Teaching Philosophy in Early Modern Europe

Susanna Berger is Associate Professor of Art History and Philosophy at the University of Southern California. Her research and teaching explore diverse facets of visual art and intellectual history in early modern Europe (ca. 1500-1800), from forgotten prints and drawings of philosophical knowledge to celebrated works in the history of European painting by Caravaggio and other artists. Her first book, The Art of Philosophy: Visual Thinking in Europe from the Late Renaissance to the Early Enlightenment, appeared with Princeton University Press in 2017 and was awarded the 2018 Bainton Prize. Her articles are published and forthcoming in The Art Bulletin, The Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, Art History, Intellectual History Review, Word & Image, Early Science and Medicine, Global Intellectual History, British Art Journal, and Gutenberg-Jahrbuch. Berger was previously a member of the Princeton Society of Fellows and has been awarded a 2019 Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship. Daniel Garber is the A. Watson Armour III University Professor of Philosophy at Princeton University. Garber's principal interests are the relations between philosophy, science, religion and society in the period of the Scientific Revolution. In addition to numerous articles, Garber is the author of Descartes' Metaphysical Physics (1992), Descartes Embodied (2001), and Leibniz: Body, Substance, Monad (2009) and is co-editor with Michael Ayers of the Cambridge History of Seventeenth-Century Philosophy (1998). Most recently, he has been working on a project to understand the idea of a "new philosophy" in the early modern period, the emergence of the novatores or "innovators" in tension with more traditional philosophical and scientific projects, largely (though not exclusively) at universities. In this connection, he has been particularly interested in understanding the interaction between tradition and innovation at the various sites in which they have been in contact with one another, and both the dismissal of the tradition by self-styled innovators, and the hostility toward the new on the part of more traditional scholars and thinkers.