NOTCOM is a five-year research project in the history of philosophy of science, funded by an ERC Advanced Grant, 2023-2027. It is dedicated to the epistemology, methods, and communication strategies of collective science in the seventeenth century.

NOTCOM is a philosophical study of common notions, collective inquiry, and dissemination strategies in seventeenth-century natural science, with special focus on the role of so-called “common notions”. Using a ground-breaking transversal methodology, it studies:

• epistemological models of consensus as they emerged from early modern controversies in logic, rhetoric, moral philosophy, theology and law, and how they were re-deployed within natural philosophy;
• methods of collective inquiry in early modern natural philosophy;
• the role of consensus models and methods of collective inquiry in the public dissemination of early modern natural philosophy;
• the actuality of early modern consensus models and methods of collective inquiry in relation to current philosophy of science and science communication studies.

PI: Mogens Laerke (CNRS Research Director at IHRIM
The project is co-hosted by ENS de Lyon and the Maison Française d’Oxford (MFO)