The question is certainly one of the oldest and most common techniques in the history of knowledge. The conference seeks to contribute to a history of the question as an epistemic genre in the early modern age. Questions to be discussed include: What was the epistemic status attributed to the questions and the answers elicited in different institutional and medial contexts? How were questions raised and distributed, who asked them and who was supposed to answer them? What was the status of answers given across various genres and media? What was the relationship between oral and written forms of debate, especially those which emerged with the periodical media of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries? Finally, how does the question relate to the emerging forms of critique from the seventeenth century onward?
Programme
Wednesday, 3 April
15:30–16:00
Anita Traninger, Martin Urmann (Freie Universität Berlin, CRC 980 “Episteme in Motion”)
Welcome and Introduction
16:00–17:00
Eva Cancik-Kirschbaum (Freie Universität Berlin, CRC 980 “Episteme in Motion”)
The Question: The Emergence of an Epistemic Practice in Ancient Mesopotamia
17:00–17:15 Coffee break
17:15–18:15
Irene van Renswoude (University of Amsterdam)
Yes and No, What was the Question? Pedagogy, Dialectic and Disputation before the Rise of the Universities (800–1200)
18:15–19:15
Rudolf Schüßler (Universität Bayreuth)
Questions of Morality in the Early Modern Period
Thursday, 4 April
10:00–11:00
Arjan van Dixhoorn (University College Roosevelt, Middelburg)
“To the Question”: Intellectual Exercises in Early Modern Flemish-Dutch Rhetorician Culture
11:00–12:00
Déborah Blocker (University of California, Berkeley)
“Questionare, Velare e Burlare”: Uses (and Misuses) of the Quaestio Among the Alterati of Florence (1569–1630)
12:00–12:15 Coffee break
12:15–13:15
Kathryn Murphy (University of Oxford)
Questions and the Emergence of the English Essay
13:15–14:45 Lunch Break
14:45–15:45
Dmitri Levitin (University of Oxford/University of Utrecht)
Disputations, Questions, and Free Speech in the Confessional University: A Remarkable New Discovery
15:45–16:45
Flynn Allott (University of Oxford)
On Questionnaires as Textual Ghosts and Social Forms: The Case of Seventeenth-Century Antiquarian “Quare Sheets”
16:45–17:00 Coffee Break
17:00–18:00
Anita Traninger (Freie Universität Berlin, CRC 980 “Episteme in Motion”)
Astonishing Answers: Paradox and the Affective Corollaries of Questioning the Status Quo
18:00–19:00
Gianna Pomata (Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore)
“Theoremata, Problemata, Paradoxa”: How to Frame Open Questions in Early Modern Epistemic Cultures
Friday, 5 April
09:00–10:00
Nicolas Schapira (Université Paris Nanterre)
The Question as a Political Tool in Absolutist France
10:00–11:00
Jan Lazardzig (Freie Universität Berlin)
Lost and Found. The Labyrinth as Epistemic Trope in the Seventeenth Century (Andreae, Comenius, Bacon)
11:00–11:15 Coffee break
11:15–12:15
Martin Urmann (Freie Universität Berlin, CRC 980 “Episteme in Motion”)
The Question at Stake. The Content of the Form in the Prize Contests of the French Academies
12:15–13:15 Lunch Break
13:15–14:15
Gideon Stiening (Universität Münster)
“What Can I Know? What Should I Do? What Can I Hope For?” Kant’s Questions
14:15–15:15
Daniel Stader (Freie Universität Berlin)
What is Enlightenment? On the Greatest Prize Question Never Posed
15:15–15:30
Concluding Remarks
