Work in Progress Spring 2025 - The Logic of History in Early-Modern Europe
Richard Serjeantson (Lecturer in History at Trinity College Cambridge): ‘The Logic of History in Early-Modern Europe’
The goal of this paper is to offer a new perspective on the history of the arts of argument by considering a hitherto unexplored, and perhaps also unexpected question: what was the relationship between logic and history in the early-modern period? The answers to this question will (it is hoped) offer a new perspective on the motivations of some sixteenth- and seventeenth-century logicians, and one historian, while also (in our own age of artificial intelligence) offering some more speculative thoughts about the deep history of ideas of artificial reason.
Richard Serjeantson teaches history at Trinity College, Cambridge. A recent publication is (with Michael Edwards) René Descartes: Regulae ad directionem ingenii: An Early Manuscript Version (Oxford University Press, 2023). His edition of John Case’s intensely humanistic unpublished manuscript book from 1596 entitled In Defence of Universities (Apologia Academiarum) will be published by Oxford University Press in the coming year.
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IMAGE: Giovan Francesco Penni (attrib.), Il Battesimo di Costantino (Sala dei Pontifici, Vatican City).
This page was last updated on 22 January 2025
