Léon Robin Centre for the Study of Ancient Thought

Gysembergh Victor

Details: Last Updated on Sunday, 28 April 2024 19:50

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Victor Gysembergh was born in Roubaix in 1987. He was admitted to the École normale supérieure de Paris (2007) and to the agrégation de Lettres classiques (2010). After a master's degree in Classics at the University of Paris-Sorbonne and a master's degree in Assyriology at the University of Heidelberg, he defended his doctorate in Ancient Studies at the University of Reims in 2015. He then received research grants from the Fondation Thiers (Paris, 2015-2016) and Alexander-von-Humboldt Stiftung (Freie Universität Berlin, 2017-2019). He has taught at the Universities of Heidelberg and Reims, Freie Universität Berlin, and Sorbonne Université. In 2018, he joined the CNRS, at the Centre Léon Robin de recherches sur la pensée antique. In 2023, he defended his Habilitation to direct research at Sorbonne University.

Since 2018, much of his research has focused on the study of palimpsest and damaged manuscripts using advanced imaging techniques, notably multispectral imaging. He is currently leading several research projects in this field, funded by Sorbonne Université and the City of Paris. This work has led to the rediscovery of Claudius Ptolemy's lost treatise on his Meteoroscope, fragments of Hipparchus' Star Catalogue, and fragments of a Latin introduction to Platonic philosophy (often referred to as the "New Apuleius"). He is currently pursuing his explorations in various collections containing palimpsest and damaged manuscripts, notably at the Bibliothèque nationale de France and in various libraries preserving Northern Italian manuscripts.

His work lies at the intersection of the history of philosophy and the history of science. A common denominator is the desire to renew the interpretation of Greco-Latin sources by taking into account not only cuneiform texts, but also other ancient and medieval languages of learning. With W. Furley, he has published the monograph Reading the Liver. Papyrological Texts on Ancient Greek Extispicy (Tübingen, 2015), and with A. Schwab the collective volume Le travail du savoir. Philosophie, sciences exactes et sciences appliquées dans l'Antiquité (Trier, 2015), and he updated M. Federspiel's translation, Aristote. Traité du ciel (Paris, 2017).

He has also published the only known fragments of ancient commentaries on Aristotle's Sophistic Refutations, which he discovered in a treatise by the humanist Agostino Nifo (Forgotten Commentaries on Aristotle's Sophistical Refutations, Berlin, 2023). He is also the author of articles and reviews available here and here in open access, mainly on the interpretation of fragments relating to the history of science, cosmology and philosophy in antiquity. In 2024, he completed a translated and annotated edition of the fragments of Eudoxus of Cnidus for « Budé » collection (Collection des Universités de France), and is preparing a similar volume about the school of Eudoxe. In the longer term, he is preparing an edition, with translation and commentary, of the fragments of Hipparchus of Nicaea.