Mattia Mantovani

Mattia Mantovani is a Historian of medieval and early-modern philosophy and science, with a special focus on perception theories and science iconography, and on the Cartesian tradition in general. He is currently FWO Senior Fellow at KU Leuven, with a project on “Animal Minds and the Puzzle of Perception. A Seventeenth-Century Debate”.

Mattia completed his PhD in philosophy at the Humboldt University of Berlin in 2018, and was awarded fellowships at St. John’s College in Oxford, the University of Pennsylvania, the Descartes Center in Utrecht and Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin. Mattia was awarded the 2024 Kristeller-Popkin Travel Fellowship by the Journal of the History of Philosophy, for a project on Elisabeth of Bohemia.

His papers appeared in, among others, Early Science and Medicine, Journal of Early Modern Studies, Vivarium and Oxford Studies in Early Modern Philosophy. He is the editor of Descartes in the Classroom. Teaching Philosophy in the Early Modern Age and Cartesian Imagery. Picturing Philosophy in the Early Modern Age, both for Brill.

Mattia is currently working on his first monograph, under the title Atoms, Painters, and a Hidden God. A Microhistory of Cartesian Philosophy.