Philosophical Meditations

An event I discovered on the Ancient Philosophy Calendar, but too late to buy a reasonable plane ticket! (Yes, such a conference is in my view so valuable that it would be worth traveling across the Atlantic to attend!)


Marcel van Ackeren (Köln), Martin Lenz (Berlin), John Marenbon (Cambridge)

When Descartes called his famous work the Meditationes, he was looking back to a long tradition of philosophical meditations, which historians of philosophy have rarely investigated. The object of this conference is to repair that neglect by examining meditation in ancient and medieval philosophy, up to the sixteenth century. It will take place on the afternoon of Friday 9 November and in the morning and early afternoon of Saturday 10 November, at Trinity College (exact venue to be determined). All are welcome. My e-mail address is jm258@cam.ac.uk .

Friday, 9 November

14:00
Welcome & Introduction

14:15
Georg Rechenhauer (Regensburg)
Meditative Aspekte im vorsokratischen Denken

15:15
Coffee-Break

15:30
Christopher Gill (Exeter)
Stoic Meditations before Marcus Aurelius

16:30
Marcel van Ackeren (Köln)
„Say to yourself“ – The written Meditations by Marcus Aurelius

17:30
Coffee-Break

17.45
Jörn Müller (Bonn)
Augustine’s Cogito: The Meditative Discovery of the Inner Man

18:45
Nadja Germann (Freiburg i. Br.)
Avicenna on Meditation

21.00
Conference dinner, G2 Nevile’s Court, Trinity College*


Saturday, 10 November

09:30
John Marenbon (Cambridge)
Anselm on Meditation

10:30
Coffee-Break

10:45
Lydia Wegener (Köln)
“In meditatione est labor cum fructu” – Richard of St Victor’s Concept of Meditation in His ‘Benjamin’-Treatises

11:45
Chris Martin (Auckland)
Self Knowledge and the Limits of Certainty: Some Late Thirteenth Century Thinkers on the Problem of the Mind’s Access to Itself

12:45
Lunch ( a sandwich lunch will be provided for all those attending)

14:00
Martin Stone (Leuven)
16th Century Jesuits

15:00
Martin Lenz (Berlin)
Informal comments on Meditation and Mental Language

15:30
Final Discussion