The Cure of the Imagination. Intersections of Pedagogy, Medicine and Aesthetics in the Enlightenment

Programme

All times are Bucharest times (UTC/GMT +2 hours)

Friday, November 26th

15:00 – Opening Remarks

Chair: Tinca Prunea-Bretonnet

15:15 – Sorana Corneanu, Logic, Imagination and the Government of Thoughts in the Early Enlightenment

16:00 – Andreas Blank, Malebranche and Mably on Pathologies of the Imagination and How to Cure Them

16:45 – Break

Chair: Stefanie Buchenau

17:15 – Alexandra Bacalu, From “Random Wit” to “True Ingenuity”: Shaftesbury on Soliloquy, the Discipline of the Imagination, and Poetic Skill

18:00 – Endre Szécsényi, Imagination - Delusion - Dream: On the Emergence of the Aesthetic

Saturday, November 27th

Chair: Simon Grote

15:00 – Guido Giglioni, Giambattista Vico and the Cunning of the Imagination

15:45 – Alessandro Nannini, An Aesthetic Cure of the Soul. Bolten and the Origins of Psychotherapy

16:30 – Break

Chair: Alessandro Nannini

17:00 – Andreas Rydberg, Disinterested Observations of a Sensible Mind

17:45 – Semyon Reshenin, Friedrich Schiller on the Role of Imagination in Enabling Freedom of Choice

18:30 – Break

Chair: Sorana Corneanu

18:45 – Colin McQuillan, Self-Observation, Self-Image, and Self-Consciousness in Kant’s Anthropology          

19.30 – Conclusive Remarks

In the last few decades, the idea of the “cure of the soul” or medicina mentis has enjoyed wide currency within early modern studies. While according to Hadot and Foucault the application of this notion was problematic in post-Cartesian thought, the latest research has shown that a practical-paideic conception of philosophy is very much at home in the seventeenth century, from Bacon to Descartes, from Spinoza to Locke. In this conference we aim to further extend the study of this conception and investigate its significance in an age – the age of the Enlightenment – which is still under-researched in this respect. More specifically, we aim to investigate the way in which the “therapies of the mind” intersect multiple discourses of the eighteenth century up to Kant, from ethics and pedagogy to the so-called “rational medicine”, taking up motifs from the previous century, but also introducing new elements of reflection.

The focus of our conference will be the problem of the imagination: we aim to study the conceptualisation of the specific diseases of the imagination as well as the strategies and spiritual exercises used for their possible cure. The focus on the imagination makes it possible to examine the exchanges between the different areas of Enlightenment knowledge in an original way. As is well known, the imagination is tightly linked with the issue of the internal senses, and represents an essential point of view both for understanding the evolution of the Aristotelian tradition in the early modern period and for emerging discourses such as those of aesthetics and psychotherapy. For this reason, we intend to analyse how the cure of the imagination both anticipates and catalyses the rise of these new disciplines. 

The conference is organised within the research project Between Truth and Freedom: Enlightenment Answers to 'Thinking for Oneself’ (funded by UEFISCDI; code PN-III-P4-ID-PCE-2020-2579).

For all those who might be interested in participating in the conference, please request the link zoom at [email protected]