The Gaukroger Lecture has been established by the International Society for Intellectual History in honour of Prof. Stephen Gaukroger (1950-2023). We’re delighted that Prof. Corneanu has agreed to give the inaugural lecture. The event is co-hosted by the Department of History at the University of Edinburgh, and will take place in hybrid form.
14:00 BST, Tuesday 26 May
G.159 – MacLaren Stuart Room (Old College), and online (register on this site)
The Art of Thinking: Towards a New Practice Turn in the Intellectual History of Early Modern Logic
Prof. Sorana Corneanu, University of Bucharest
Lecture abstract: Among Stephen Gaukroger’s many contributions to our understanding of early modern philosophical cultures were his notes on logic as a normative theory of thought and the shifts it went through from the late scholastics to Francis Bacon’s or René Descartes’ philosophies of mind and method. These were early interventions in a historiographic conversation that has lately gained noticeable momentum. In this Inaugural Lecture I take stock of the current re-valuation of early modern logic and dwell on one strand of it, which holds the promise of articulating a new historiographic ‘practice turn’. According to this strand, the type of early modern logic that was described as an ‘art’ or ‘method’ of thinking was the expression of a comprehensive attitude to human thinking as an activity governed by practices. I propose to sketch a preliminary map of this notion, assess its distinction from, and relation to, the older turn to practice in the historical, philosophical and social studies of science, and describe an illustrative example in John Locke’s work on the conduct of the understanding.
Sorana Corneanu is Professor of English in the Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literatures, University of Bucharest. She works on conceptions of the workings, vices and virtues of the mind, approaches to the imagination and the passions, views on pedagogy and education, and the fortunes of the art of thinking in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. She is the author of Regimens of the Mind: Boyle, Locke, and the Early Modern Cultura Animi Tradition (Chicago, 2011) and editor or co-editor of collective volumes on the care of the self in early modern philosophy and science, on Francis Bacon’s philosophy of motion and power, and on the history of the disciplines. Most recently, together with Tinca Prunea-Bretonnet, she has edited a special issue of Intellectual History Review on The Art of Thinking: Mind and Method in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Centuries Logics (2025) and is preparing a collective volume on Practices of Thinking: New Perspectives on Early Modern and Enlightenment Philosophical Cultures for Brill.
Image credit: Jacopo Zucchi, Minerva and the Forge of Vulcan (circa 1565). Scottish National Gallery.