Fabrizio Baldassarri

Fabrizio Baldassarri (PhD, Philosophy and Anthropology, University of Parma; BA/MA, University of Bologna) is currently Principal Investigator of the research project “The Overlooked History of Vegetal Life: From the Vegetative Soul to Metabolism in Early Modern Philosophy and Biomedicine” at ICUB in Bucharest. Fabrizio has held a postdoctoral fellowship at the Herzog August Bibliothek in Wolfenbüttel, a Journal for the History of Philosophy Kristeller-Popkin fellowship at Utrecht University, a postdoctoral fellowship at Bar-Ilan University, Tel Aviv, and a DAAD postdoctoral fellowship at the Gotha Research Centre, Erfurt. From 2017 to 2018, he taught medical humanities at the University of Padua. His research focus is the study of plants in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century natural philosophy, botany, and medicine.

Fabrizio has organized sessions and panels at several conferences, such as “Manipulating Flora,” which is now a special issue of Early Science and Medicine (2018), and “Vegetative Powers.” He is currently organizing a conference on “Non-Linear Narratives” (Bucharest, March 2020) and a workshop on the light and shadow of Cartesian medicine (Pisa, May 2020).

Fabrizio has published widely on Descartes’s philosophy and medicine, and on the study of botany in the early modern period. He is working on a monograph on Descartes’s medical philosophy and on three edited volumes.

Publications

• Vegetative Powers: The Roots of Life in Ancient, Medieval and Early Modern Natural Philosophy, ed. by F. Baldassarri, A. Blank, Cham: Springer, “International Archives of the History of Ideas.” Forthcoming.
• “The Mechanical Life of Plants: Descartes on Botany,” in British Journal for the History of Science 52 (2019): 41–63.
• “Descartes’ Bio-Medical Study of Plants: Vegetative Activities, Soul, and Power,” in Early Science and Medicine 23 (2018): 509–529.
• Controversies in Intellectual History and Medicine: The Case of Losers, Heretics, and Outsiders, ed. by F. Baldassarri, in Society & Politics 12(1), Spring 2018.
• “[P]er experientiam scilicet, vel deductionem.' Descartes’ Battle for Scientia in the Early 1630s,” in Historia Philosophica 15 (2017): 115–133.