Event: Philosophy Books at the National Library: Windows into an Uncharted Intellectual Culture
Date: 23 April 2024
Time: 18:30
Venue: Reading Hall, National Library of Malta, Valletta
Speaker: Prof. Jean-Paul DeLucca
This is the sixth lecture in the National Library of Malta Public Lectures Series 2023-2024, ‘Knowledge in the Making: Towards an Intellectual History of Early Modern Malta’. The series is organised in collaboration with the UM Department of Philosophy.
Books, along with their provenance and marginal notes, provide valuable insights into the intellectual milieu in which they were read. This lecture will focus on the heterogeneous collection of early modern printed books, covering various fields of philosophical inquiry, housed at Malta’s National Library. By bringing to the fore examples of works by Italian and Northern humanists, along with texts on natural philosophy and epistemology that shaped the dawn of modernity, the lecture will shed light on the significance of the collection. Though partial and inevitably incomplete, this preliminary bibliographic survey reveals an array of famous and lesser-known philosophers, testifying to the wider interests of readers when compared to more ‘canonical’ texts used typically in formal academic institutions and religious houses of studies.
Prof. Jean-Paul De Lucca is associate professor at the University of Malta, where he lectures on Renaissance and early modern philosophy and intellectual history, political philosophy, and the philosophy of law. He has held research fellowships at the Università di Roma Tre, the Warburg Institute (University of London) and the De Wulf-Mansion Centre for Ancient, Medieval and Renaissance Philosophy (Institute of Philosophy, KU Leuven). He has served on the editorial or advisory boards of several academic journals. His research focuses especially on Tommaso Campanella (1568-1639).
The National Library Public Lecture Series 2023-2024 is a collaboration between the National Library and the UM Department of Philosophy. The series is coordinated by Maroma Camilleri, Prof. Jean-Paul De Lucca and Mevrick Spiteri.
Free entrance. No booking required.
For more information, please send an email.