Dear All,
I am trying to obtain a year's grant from the British Academy International Mobility scheme to promote a collaborative project with the Philosophy Department of Peking University. At the centre of the project will be a collaboration between myself and Dr Tianyue Wu, who also works on medieval (European) philosophy, but we very much want to involve those working on other areas of philosophy, especially contemporary philosophy of mind and metaphysics. We have called the project 'Immateriality, Thinking and the Self in the Philosophy of the Long Middle Ages.' The feature of medieval and much early modern philosophy which seems strangest to readers today is the large role given to concrete, immaterial things: not just God (in all sorts of ways a special case), but souls and angels (or, in some traditions, Intelligences). All these things are considered to be essentially thinkers, but, before Descartes, the thinking involved (intelligere - 'intellectual thinking') is of a very special sort: grasping universals and syllogizing with them, so as to demonstrate scientific truths. In humans, it is only this intellectually thinking thing which is considered immaterial and immortal, and it is the subject for moral judgement, reward and punishment. Usually, this complex of ideas is simply taken for granted, as a starting point for discussing medieval philosophy of mind and metaphysics. Our project aims to examine it, distinguishing its various forms in different Western traditions from c. 200 to c.1700 and to understand it, making use of the insights of those working in other areas of philosophy, especially analytical philosophers. The year's grant would be intended to establish the project, rather than see it through to completion. We shall be asking for funding for three Cambridge philosophers to attend a workshop in Beijing, and for a workshop in Cambridge attended by three philosophers from Beijing, some other UK and European colleagues and, we hope, a number of Cambridge philosophers. There would also be funds for Dr Wu to spend two or three weeks in Cambridge. For the application, I need to give the names of some Cambridge philosophers who are willing to be part of the project. Although I hope that some of you might wish to be closely involved if the grant is approved, speaking at the workshop here or in Beijing, I am certainly not asking for that degree of commitment from most people, nor at all at this stage. By letting your name go forward, you would merely be indicating your willingness in principle to attend some of the Cambridge workshop, and/or to talk to Dr Wu about his work during his stay here. Tim Crane has already agreed to be a collaborator, in this sense, and I should be most grateful to any others of you who permit me to put their names down on the application. Some of you, by the way, may remember being approached by me in a similar sense for an application I made to the same scheme last year. That application was unsuccessful - I was given no feedback, but I think that, with its three-year span and ambitious attempt to span European and Chinese philosophy, it may have seemed over-elaborate and unlikely to produce useful results. This application concerns a different theme - the subject of research I am planning to do - and is shorter and less ambitious. With best wishes, John Marenbon
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