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Theories of Vision and Light

International Conference

17-18th May 2018, Berlin

From Antiquity to the Renaissance

Postdoctoral Fellow in Visual Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. He received his PhD in 2014 in History and Philosophy of Science from Indiana University, Bloomington. From 2015-16 Dr. Baker was a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Pittsburgh, and in 2016-17 he was the Dibner Long-Term Fellow at the Huntington Library in San Marino, California. His research is focused on the intersection of anatomy, natural philosophy, and mathematical optics in Renaissance and Early Modern Europe.

Professor of Ancient Philosophy at the University of Athens and at the University of Geneva. She is also a member of the research programme Representation and Reality. Historical and Contemporary Perspectives on the Aristotelian Tradition at the University of Gothenburg. Dr. Ierodiakonou currently works on a monograph about ancient theories of colour, as well as on an edition, translation and commentary of Theophrastus’ De sensibus and of Michael Psellos’ paraphrase of Aristotle’s De interpretatione.  

Pembroke College, holds a PhD in Law (FU Berlin) and is ordained Deacon at the Greek-Orthodox Church. He is currently working towards the completion of a second PhD in ‘The Metaphysics of Light in the Hexaemeral Literature: From Philo of Alexandria to Ambrose of Milan’ at the University of Cambridge, Divinity Faculty, under the supervision of Rowan Williams. His PhD research focuses on the reception of ancient theories of light and their theological appropriation from the early Church.

Historian of science (PhD, Harvard), with a specialty in sciences in Islamic lands. She is currently affiliated with Harvard’s Department of Classics and Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian studies and invited to be a Visiting Scholar at Cambridge University’s Department of History and Philosophy of Science. Her projects range from Arabic and Persian traditions of ancient Greek sciences to the applications of advancing technologies to historical studies.

Sinem Derya Kılıç holds an M. A. (Magister Artium) in Philosophy, Musicology and Classics from the Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz. Since 2015, she is a PhD candidate at Humboldt University of Berlin with a dissertation project focused on Plato’s philosophy of Music and Its Echo in the Renaissance. Her research interests encompass philosophy of music, aesthetics, ancient and late ancient philosophy (Plato, Aristotle, Apuleius), Renaissance philosophy, and 19th- and 20th-century philosophy (Schopenhauer, Hegel, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein).

Senior Research Fellow at the Department of Ancient and Medieval Philosophy and Science, Institute of Philosophy, Russian Academy of Sciences (IPhRAS). Professor of the Russian State University for the Humanities (RSUH). After graduating from Moscow Engineering Physics Institute, Dr. Mesiats spent some time at the University of Karlsruhe, and at the Institute of Philosophy of the Russian Academy of Sciences. The topic of her PhD thesis is "Aristotle's Physics in Neoplatonism. Proclus' treatise Elements of physics" (2000).

Junior Professor for Jewish philosophy and Aesthetics at the Institut for Jewish Studies of the Freie Universität Berlin. He studied Jewish intellectual history at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and in 2010 received a PhD in Arabic and Islamic studies at Yale University with a dissertation on the Jewish philosopher Ibn Kammuna. Prior to his appointment he was part of the Research Unit Intellectual History of the Islamicate World at the Freie Universität Berlin. He works in the field of Jewish and Muslim intellectual history of the Middle Ages with a focus on the interaction between different intellectual and cultural traditions.

Lecturer in Classics and Philosophy at the University of Kent. Dr. Rudolph studied Classics at Princeton (AB 2002) and Cambridge (MPhil 2003). After a year at Columbia University, she returned to Cambridge where she completed a PhD on ancient atomism (2009). Before joining the Classical and Archaeological Studies Department at Kent, Dr. Rudolph was an Assistant Professor at Grand Valley State University and concurrently held a post-doctoral research fellowship at Oxford University. She is currently working on the development of Presocratic sensory theory, and its "afterlife" in the Hellenistic philosophy.

Michalis Sialaros

Assistant Professor of History of Science in Antiquity in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Athens. He has published on Ancient Greek Mathematics and he has taught courses on the History of Ancient Science and Philosophy. He is currently preparing a new English commentary on Euclid’s Elements.

Mikhail Silian

Doctoral student at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. After receiving his Diplima in Philosophy at the University of St. Petersburg, Mikhail spent some time at the Catholic University of Leuven as a postgraduate student. Currently, he is working on a project about Ptolemy's account of visual properties.

Research-coordinator for series VIII of the Leibniz-Edition (scientific, medical, and technical writings) at Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities. After studying physics, psychology, classical philology, philosophy, and history of science in Augsburg and Paris, Dr. Siebert earned his doctorate in the History of Science with a thesis on Athanasius Kircher (1602-1680) and the cosmological controversy (publ. 2006). Subsequently, he habilitated with a thesis on Ptolemy’s Optics and its context (publ. 2014).

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