This workshop will bring Princeton faculty and graduate students together with scholars from outside institutions to consider the “freedom of philosophizing” at work in the early Enlightenment and late Reformation, exploring “economies of obligation” and ideas of kinship, exchange, and patronage.

Day 1 • Thursday, March 27

Julis Romo Rabinowitz Building, 399 Ruehl Family Room

10 – 10:30 a.m. – Introduction

10:30 a.m. – 12 p.m.

Francesco Quatrini, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, “Unbounded Freedom? The Collegiants, Women, and the Freedom to Prophesy”

1 – 2:30 p.m.

Hasana Sharp, McGill University, “Free Thought in the Dutch Empire”

3 – 4:30 p.m.

Mogens Laerke, CNRS, Maison Française d’Oxford, “The Authority of Humanity: Human Living and Intellectual Friendship in Spinoza”

Day 2 • Friday, March 28

Robertson Hall 020

9  – 10:30 a.m.

Katie Kadue, Binghamton University, “Love’s Soft Bands: Contractual Servitude in Petrarchan Lyric"

11 a.m. – 12:30 p.m

Abigail Swingen, Texas Tech University, “The Meanings of Freedom and Security: Debating England’s Financial Revolution in the 1690s”

2 – 3:30 p.m.

Justin Steinberg, Cornell University, “Spinoza’s Political Ontology”

4 – 5:30 p.m.

Roundtable Discussion on Mogens Laerke’s Spinoza and the Freedom of Philosophizing (2021)

with Daniel Garber, Princeton University; Julie Klein, Villanova University; Daniel Klugman, Princeton University; Nigel Smith, Princeton University; and William Theodorou, Princeton University.

Mogens Lærke

Senior Researcher Directeur de RechercheCNRS, Maison Française d’Oxford

Mogens Lærke is a senior researcher at the CNRS, visiting from the research institute IHRIM (CNRS, UMR 5317) at the Ecole Normale Supérieure de Lyon. After finishing his Ph.D. at the University of Paris IV in 2003, he held positions at Aarhus University, the Carlsberg Foundation, Tel Aviv University, the University of Chicago, and the University of Aberdeen. He has been a researcher at the CNRS since 2013. He obtained his habilitation at the ENS de Lyon in 2014. Lærke is currently the secretary of the British Society of the History of Philosophy (BSHP), the managing editor of the BSHP New Texts in the History of Philosophy series from Oxford University Press, and the founder and co-organizer of the annual conference Scottish Seminar in Early Modern Philosophy (SSEMP). He specializes in early modern philosophy.

Talk title: “The Authority of Humanity: Human Living and Intellectual Friendship in Spinoza”

Katie Kadue

Assistant Professor of English, General Literature and Rhetoric, Binghamton University State University of New York

Katie Kadue specializes in early modern English and French literature and culture. Her first book, Domestic Georgic: Labors of Preservation from Rabelais to Milton (University of Chicago Press, 2021), shows how male authors of the 16th and 17th centuries conceived of the work of writing as a form of housework, an activity concerned primarily with keeping language, ideas and intellectual communities together — and in suspension — as housewives put up preserves and kept up homes. Her current research looks at how male Renaissance poets used the genres of love lyric to mediate anxieties about masculinity and obsolescence, projecting onto women their ambivalent feelings about originality, literary tradition and the hard work of performing as sexual and poetic subjects.

Talk title: “Love’s Soft Bands: Contractual Servitude in Petrarchan Lyric”

Francesco Quatrini

Lecturer, Faculty of Religion and Theology, Texts and Traditions, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam

Francesco Quatrini’s Adam Boreel (1602-1665): A Collegiant's Attempt to Reform Christianity (Brill, 2020) is a biographical and thematic study of one of the most enigmatic – and perhaps one of the most important – of the period’s religious and scientific thinkers. In the first major biography of this figure, and in almost two hundred thousand words, Quatrini reconstructs from complex and often ambiguous sources Boreel’s childhood in the Dutch Reformed church, the intellectual agendas and travels by which he was exposed to more radical forms of Christianity, the friendship networks in which he worked on projects that seem to have designed the conversation of the Jews, and most significantly of all the unofficial institutions that fostered the wide-ranging and open-ended conversations on religious subjects that marked the communal life of the Collegiants.

Talk title: “Unbounded Freedom? The Collegiants, Women, and the Freedom to Prophesy”

Hasana Sharp

Professor of Philosophy, McGill University

Hasana Sharp earned her Ph.D. from the Pennsylvania State University (2005) and a diplôme (pensionnaire scientifique étranger) from the Ecole Normale Supérieure des Lettres et Sciences Humaines (2004). Her research is in the history of political philosophy with a focus on Spinoza.  Her book, Spinoza and the Politics of Renaturalization (University of Chicago, 2011), examines the implications of Spinoza's denial of human exceptionalism for ethics and politics, with consideration of arguments in feminist thought, critical philosophy of race, and ecocriticism. She interested in how his analyses of human servitude, bondage, and slavery, central to both his ethics and politics, can be understood in relationship to other models. In particular, how do Spinoza's philosophical and political conceptions of servitude interact with the notions of his contemporaries objecting to the enslavement of African and Indigenous peoples or to the domination of women? Her teaching interests include the history of political thought, early modern philosophy, feminism, philosophy of race, and environmental thoughts.

Talk Title: “Free Thought in the Dutch Empire”

Justin Steinberg

Professor of Philosophy, Cornell University

Justin Steinberg works primarily on early modern political thought and the history of ethics. While much of his published work has been on Spinoza, he has also written about Hobbes, Grotius, and Hume, among others, and is beginning work on Émilie du Châtelet. In addition to his work in the history of philosophy, he has written more generally about empathy, humility, and the psychology of tolerance.

He is currently working on a book about individuation and social ontology in the early-modern period, examining the metaphysical commitments behind early modern theories of the body politic and other social entities, and exploring the normative significance of these commitments.

Talk title: “Spinoza’s Political Ontology”

Abigail Swingen

Associate Professor of History, Texas Tech University

Abigail Swingen’s research interests include the origins and consequences of England's Financial Revolution, the development of the British empire in the early modern period, ideas of political economy, labor, and slavery in the early modern world, and the development of early modern political culture, stereotypes, and disinformation. Her current book project, “The Financial Revolution and the Politics of Moral Crisis in Early Modern Britain” explores the connections between the emergence of Britain as a financial capitalist economy, the development of public credit and the national debt, and the origins of the British empire in the early modern period.

Talk title: “The Meanings of Freedom and Security: Debating England’s Financial Revolution in the 1690s”