Mattia Mantovani

Mattia Mantovani studied philosophy at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, obtaining his PhD in 2018 with a dissertation on Descartes’s theory of vision. He has worked as a doctoral and postdoctoral researcher at the Descartes Centre in Utrecht, the University of Pennsylvania, and the Leopoldina, Nationale Akademie der Wissenschaften in Halle. Since 2019, Mattia has been a postdoctoral researcher at KU Leuven, with a project on the long-term history of perception theories and their broader epistemological and metaphysical implications, which he is currently turning into a monograph, From Truth to Ecology. Reassessing the History of the Senses, 1250-1750. His current MPIWG project, in Katja Krause’s Research Group “Premodern Sciences,” investigates the debates about animal perception in the Middle Ages and their early modern developments. Mattia has published on Roger Bacon and the medieval vision theorists, on Descartes and the Cartesian tradition up to Locke, and on scientific diagrams, in venues including Early Science and Medicine, Vivarium, Oxford Studies in Early Modern Philosophy, and Journal of Early Modern Studies. He is about to publish two large collected volumes on the early modern teaching of Descartes’s philosophy and its visual legacy, as well as a special issue of Notes and Records on the topic “Picturing Life in the Early Modern Age.” Since 2020, Mattia has been book review editor of Physis. Journal of the Italian Society for the History of Science.

Publications

• “The Institution of Nature. Descartes on Human Perception”, Oxford Studies in Early Modern Philosophy 11 (2022), forthcoming.

• Mattia Mantovani and Davide Cellamare, eds., Descartes in the Classroom. Teaching Cartesian Philosophy in the Early Modern Age (Leiden: Brill 2022), forthcoming.

• “The First of All Natural Sciences. Roger Bacon on Perspectiva and Human Knowledge”, Vivarium 59/3 (2021), 186-214.

• “Descartes’ Man Under Construction. The Circulatory Statue of Salomon Reisel, 1680”, Early Science and Medicine 25/2 (2020), 101-134.

• “Visio per sillogismum: Sensation and Cognition in 13th-Century Theories of Vision”, in Elena Băltuță, ed., Medieval Perceptual Puzzles. Theories of Sense Perception in the 13th and 14th Centuries (Leiden: Brill 2020), 111-152.