The Balzan Foundation collects scientific contributions, and dissertations from its prizewinners for periodic publications. The Balzan Papers journal has been digital since 2024, and here, some updates on the research projects of the Balzan prizewinners are also gathered.
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recent papers
Quentin Skinner
Skinner reflects on his intellectual path over the past twenty years, from theorizing a third concept of freedom, to reconstructing the concept of State and defending it in our normative discourse against oversimplifying theorizers of the «death of the State», to the crisis of contemporary democracies.
Marco Ferrari
Recent assumptions about the nature and physiology of plants could revolutionise our perspective on the world of plants. But orthodoxy is not easy to change. The first of this two-part article deals with plant neurobiology.
Marylin Strathern
During the COVID-19 pandemic, divergent as well as convergent narratives cried out for attention. Strathern discusses them through the anthropological response and its reception in the UK while questioning individual responsibility and the usefulness of “common humanity” as a universal concept.
Peter Brown
Susannah Gold interviews Peter Brown and his Balzan research project leader, David Michelson, about the process of “reconceiving the historical reference work” with the online historical reference for Syriac studies, syriaca.org, the cornerstone of Figures in a Landscape.
In presenting the work of Jean-Jacques Hublin, 2023 Balzan Prize for the Evolution of Humankind: Paleoanthropology, Francesco Ranci traces a ‘genealogy’ of Balzan Prizewinners who have done research in or related to the field.
François Rosset and Michel Porret
The authors reflect on philosophical historian Bronisław Baczko’s research project (2011 Balzan Prize), Dictionnaire critique de l’utopie au temps des Lumières, an embodiment of his conception of utopia and a complex view of the socio-political and literary culture of the era of the Philosophes.
