Sean Coughlin

I am currently Junior Star Research Fellow at the Institute of Philosophy of the Czech Academy of Sciences and associate scientist at the Institute of Organic Chemistry and Biochemistry of the Czech Academy.

I am PI of the Czech Science Foundation (GACR) grant GM 21-30494M, Alchemies of Scent, a 5-year interdisciplinary research project whose aim is to develop methods of reconstructing practices of ancient Greco-Egyptian perfumery and place perfumery in the history of alchemy and science.

Before that, I was a research fellow with SFB 980 Episteme in Bewegung, Excellence Cluster Topoi, the Research Training Group-Philosophy, Science and the Sciences and Einstein-Centre Chronoi. I have also worked as a laboratory assistant at the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioural Neurosciences at McMaster University in Canada and I worked as a cook for a bit between undergrad and grad school. I studied philosophy and classics at McGill University where I received my BA in 2005, before going on to earn a Masters and PhD in philosophy at the University of Western Ontario in 2013.

My research focuses on natural science in the ancient world: what they thought natural science was, what things they thought were worth studying, what methods they thought should be used to study them, and what metaphors and models they used to understand them. I am co-editor, with Orly Lewis and David Leith, of The Concept of Pneuma after Aristotle (2020), and I've published on ancient philosophy and medicine, especially on metaphors and concepts shared among philosophers and doctors. Some of my work on techniques in ancient pharmacology and perfumery has been exhibited at the National Geographic Society Headquarters in Washington DC.