Seminar EHESS/CNRS organised by Koen Vermeir (CNRS) with Elizabeth Claire (CNRS), Béatrice Delaurenti (EHESS), Roberto Poma (University Paris Est-Créteil).
The concept of imagination is today seen as as a legitimate object of study, having long been discredited by scientific research. However, in modern and contemporary literature, imagination is generally considered in a negative way, as a mental faculty that can cause disease, error, illusion or sin. By cons, its role was very important, because the imagination formed the necessary link between body and soul.
So that was the preferred place to act to perform bodily healing as well as spiritual.
We would go against this idea of imagination by studying intellectual tradition and alternative and misunderstood practice. Since the XIIth and XIIIth centuries until the early XIXth century, thinkers and practitioners from a diverse set of disciplines, expressing themselves from different institutional positions, supported the idea that imagination has great powers on the body and on the body and mind of others.
As in the previous years, the seminar will work around these texts in the manner of a workshop, and will endeavor to implement a collective work of discussion, analysis and comparison of sources over the long term.
PROGRAMME 2017-2018
On Fridays, 1pm – 5pm, at EHESS 105 bd Raspail, 75006 Paris, Room 5
| 9/02, 13/04, 8/06 |
- 13:00 – 15:00 : Koen Vermeir (Paris, CNRS)
Imagination et savoir
- 15:00 – 17:00 : Roberto Poma (Paris, UPEC)
Ludovico Muratori : Misère et grandeur de la force de l’imagination
- 9:00 – 11:00 : Didier Khan (Paris, CNRS)
Imagination, alchimie et paracelsisme
- 11:00 – 13:00 : Mary Baine Campbell (Waltham MA, Brandeis University)
Memory and imagination (tbc)
Morning (Room 11)
- 9:00 – 10:30 Roberto Poma (Paris, UPEC)
Imagination et danse : la folie choréique et ses interprétations à l’époque moderne.
- 10:45 – 12:15 Mary Baine Campbell (Chercheuse en résidence, Institut d’études avancées de Paris)
A Night of Dreams before the Day of Enlightenment: Descartes and the lost Olympiques.
- 12:15 – 13:30 lunchbreak
Afternooon (Room 9)
- 13:30 – 15:00 Hans Joachim Dethlefs (Tokyo, Chuo University)
The role of imagination in a Sixteenth-Century German Commentary on Book XXX of Pliny’s Natural History.
- 15:15 – 16:45 Patricia Falguière (Paris, EHESS)
Art, technique et imagination.
The talk of Didier Khan, on April 13, is postponed to next year.
