Mogens Laerke (CNRS), 'The Common Notion. A Project on Science and Consensus in the Seventeenth Century' 

In this paper, I present a research programme. The project in question is a five-year ERC project on seventeenth-century natural philosophy shared between the Maison Française d’Oxford and the Ecole Normale Suépriere de Lyon entitled The Common Notion. Science and Consensus in the Seventeenth Century (NOTCOM). It began very recently, in January 2023. NOTCOM is a study of common notions, epistemologies and methods of collective science, and public dissemination strategies in seventeenth-century natural philosophy, with special focus on the role of so-called “common notions.” Philosophically, it is concerned with a particular kind of argument, namely arguments from consensus, and the way in which such arguments are both systematically and historically linked to a particular kind of concepts, namely, those that early modern philosophy followed a long and complicated tradition in designating as so-called “common notions.” Sociologically, or historically-sociologically more precisely, it is concerned with the collective conduct of natural science within early modern scientific societies and academies, and with how scientific consensus became consolidated as an integral part of the methods and practices of natural science.