Associate members

Cécile Bonmariage

Chercheuse qualifiée at the Fonds de la Recherche Scientifique (FRS-FNRS, UCLouvain)

Cécile Bonmariage is Chercheuse qualifiée at the Fonds de la Recherche Scientifique (FRS-FNRS, Belgium) and Associate Professor at the Institut supérieur de philosophie, UCLouvain where she teaches pre-modern Islamic thought. She specializes in post-classical Islamic thought in its Avicennan and Akbarī varieties, with special attention for metaphysics and human nature. Other aspects of her work include research on translations from Greek into Arabic, the influence of Avicenna’s theories in a broader milieu, magical recipes based on the science of letters, as well as practical aspects of the manuscript culture in Islamicate societies. Her current project, “Mapping Early Akbaris,” focuses on the early transformation of Akbarī thought as witnessed by commentaries on the Fuṣūṣ.

Sébastien Moureau

Maître de recherche at the FNRS and Professor at the UCLouvain

Sébastien Moureau is maître de recherche at the FNRS and Professor at the UCLouvain. He has specialised in the history of occult sciences in the Islamicate world and their transmission to the Latin West in the Middle Ages, with special attention to alchemy. In MOSAIC, he will take part in projects dealing with alchemy, as well as in dissemination activities. He is currently conducting the FNRS WelCHANGE project “Dif-Fusion. Refining and Disseminating Early Medieval Latin Alchemy”, which aims at producing a large catalogue of early Latin alchemical texts and at disseminating it, along with exhibitions and diffusion activities.

Mustakim Arıcı

Professor at I. Medeniyet University (Department of Philosophy)

Mustakim Arıcı is Professor of Philosophy at Istanbul Medeniyet University. He received his BA (Faculty of Theology) in 2002 from Marmara University (Istanbul, Turkey), where he completed his MA in Islamic philosophy in 2005. He received his PhD from Istanbul University in 2011 with a dissertation titled Najm al-Din al-Kātibī and His Thoughts on Metaphysics. Before joining Istanbul Medeniyet University, he was Assistant Professor at Istanbul University (Faculty of Theology) from 2012 to 2020.

His main research and publication areas include 13th-century philosophy and history of science, Ottoman philosophy in the 16th-17th centuries, Islamic ethics, philosophy education and madrasah curricula, ulama biographies and their networks, history of Islamic medicine and philosophy of medicine, classification of sciences literature.

As part of the MOSAIC project, Arıcı contributes to determining the classification of science literature in Islam between the 9th and the 19th centuries and to schematizing these classifications.

Gabriele Ferrario

Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Bologna

Gabriele Ferrario is Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Bologna, where he teaches the history of pre-modern science and the history of Islamic thought. His research focuses on Arabic and Hebrew science in the Middle Ages, the transmission of scientific ideas across different languages and cultures, the scientific manuscripts of the Cairo Genizah, and the history of medieval alchemical thought. He has published a monograph on the Arabic and Hebrew versions of the alchemical treatise Liber de aluminibus et salibus, as well as numerous articles on alchemical topics.

Giacomo Montanari

PhD fellow at the Department of Chemistry, University of Bologna

Giacomo Montanari holds a MS in Photochemistry and Molecular Materials and a MSc in Pharmaceutical Chemistry and Technology both from the University of Bologna, and he is currently a PhD student under co-tutelle between the Chemistry Department at the University of Bologna and the History and Philosophy of Science Department at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens. Following his experience as a research fellow for the FARE project “The Western AlchemEast” (P.I. Matteo Martelli), Giacomo’s research focuses on the trasmission and reception of Graeco-Egyptian alchemical practices in the Syro-Arabic Middle Ages, through an interdisciplinary approach that combines the study of the primary sources with experimental reconstructions.