About

Sean Coughlin is a historian of science who explores the connections between art and nature in the ancient Greek and Roman world. He is currently Junior Star Research Fellow at the Institute of Philosophy and Associate Scientist at the Institute of Organic Chemistry and Biochemistry at the Czech Academy of Sciences in Prague.

Sean has held posts at the Collaborative Research Centre SFB 980 Episteme in Motion, the Department of Classical Philology, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Excellence Cluster Topoi, and the University of Western Ontario. He has held visiting fellowships at Einstein Center: Chronoi, the Martin Buber Society of Fellows at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and the Research Training Group: Philosophy, Science and the Sciences in Berlin. He worked for a time as a cook to understand culinary metaphors in Aristotle’s biology. Before ancient philosophy, he was a laboratory technician in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioural Neurosciences at McMaster University.

He publishes on Ancient Greek and Latin philosophy, on Greco-Roman medicine and pharmacology, on genres of scientific writing, and on perfumery in the ancient Mediterranean. With David Leith and Orly Lewis, he co-edited the volume The Concept of Pneuma after Aristotle (Berlin: Edition Topoi, 2020). His work has been exhibited in at National Geographic Museum in Washington DC and the Berlin Museum of Medical History and has been covered by the BBC, the Times, the Washington Post and Repubblica.

At Alchemies of Scent, Sean will be looking at how artistic production was used as a model for understanding the natural world, and vice versa, how experience of the natural world was thought to be the source of different artistic methods.

He will also be conducting experiments on Greco-Egyptian perfume production techniques preserved in the works of Theophrastus, Dioscorides, Pliny the Elder, Galen and the medical encyclopedists, Oribasius, Aetius of Amida and Paul of Aegina.

Recent Publications

• “Eau de Cleopatra: Mendesian Perfume and Tell Timai.” With Robert J. Littman, Jay Silverstein, Dora Goldsmith, and Hamedy Mashaly. Near Eastern Archaeology 84, no. 3 (September 1, 2021): 216–29. DOI: 10.1086/715345

• “Galen on bad style (kakozēlía): Hippocratic exegesis in Galen and some predecessors”. With Maria Börno. Technai, An International Journal for Ancient Science and Technology 11, 2020, 145–175. DOI: 10.19272/202010501011

• “Cohesive Causes in Ancient Greek Philosophy and Medicine”. In Chiara Thumiger, ed. Holism in Ancient Medicine and Its Reception. Leiden: Brill, 2020, 237–267. DOI: 10.1163/9789004443143_012

• The Concept of Pneuma after Aristotle. Edited with Orly Lewis and David Leith. Berlin: Edition Topoi. 2020. 438 pp. DOI: 10.17171/3-61

• “Pneuma and the Pneumatist School of Medicine”. With Orly Lewis. In Coughlin, Leith and Lewis, eds., The Concept of Pneuma after Aristotle. Berlin: Edition Topoi, 2020, 201–234. DOI: 10.17171/3-61

Profiles

• Department for Ancient and Medieval Thought, FLÚ AV ČR

• Ullrich Jahn Group, Chemistry of Natural Products, ÚOCHB AV ČR

• ORCID

• Academia.edu

• PhilPeople

• Google Scholar