Mogens Lærke

Mogens Lærke, born in Denmark in 1971, is Senior Researcher at the CNRS, and Senior Associate at Pembroke College, Oxford. At the MFO, Lærke is the principal investigator of the research project The Common Notion. Science and Consensus in the Seventeenth Century (NOTCOM),  a five-year research project (2023-2027) in the history of philosophy of science funded by the ERC (NOTCOM, ERC AdG no. 101052433). The project is evenly split between the MFO and the research institute IHRIM (UMR 5317) at the École Normale Supérieure de Lyon. It is dedicated to the epistemology, methods, and communication strategies of collective science in the seventeenth century. For more information, see https://notcom.hypotheses.org/.

After finishing his PhD at the University of Paris IV in 2003, he held positions at Aarhus University, the Carlsberg Foundation, Tel Aviv University, the University of Chicago, and the University of Aberdeen. He has been a researcher at the CNRS since 2013. He specialises in early modern philosophy and intellectual history and has published widely on early modern metaphysics, epistemology, philosophy of science, philosophy of religion and political philosophy, and historiographical-philosophical methodology. Monographs include Leibniz lecteur de Spinoza. La genèse d’une opposition complexe (Champion 2008), Les Lumières de Leibniz. Controverses avec Huet, Bayle, Regis et More (Classiques Garnier 2015), and Spinoza and the Freedom of Philosophizing (Oxford University Press 2021). 

Lærke is member of the management committee of the British Society for the History of Philosophy (BSHP) and the managing editor of the book series “BSHP New Texts in the History of Philosophy” published by the Oxford University Press. He is the editor for early modern philosophy of the Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie, the world's oldest history of philosophy journal. He is moreover, since 2009, the founder and co-organiser of the annual conference Scottish Seminar in Early Modern Philosophy (SSEMP).