Valentina Lepri: From Notes to Knowledge: Remarks on Note-taking, Learning and Curiosity in the Early Modern Period

Organized by the Department of Comenius Studies and Early Modern Intellectual History

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Valentina Lepri (Institute of Philosophy and Sociology, Polish Academy of Sciences): From Notes to Knowledge: Remarks on Note-taking, Learning and Curiosity in the Early Modern Period

Abstract
The lecture will begin with an examination of the phenomenon of notebook production by university students in the early modern period. In this first part, the ERC research project "From East to West, and Back Again: Student Travel and Transcultural Knowledge Production in Renaissance Europe (c. 1470-c. 1620)" will be briefly introduced. The project started with a core of about fifty documents from eleven European countries and is now doubling in size. Other countries have been added, including Ukraine.

From the description of the manuscript documents, we will then move on to explore the views of some of the philosophers of the time who devoted themselves to analyzing the value of note-taking in relation to knowledge. In this second part of the lecture, special attention will be paid to the definition of pleasure and curiosity in the cognitive process, as interpreted by two thinkers as different as Juan Vives and Thomas Hobbes.