Biography 

Historian and philosopher of science, Fernando Vidal holds a Bachelor's degree in Psychology from the University of Geneva (1984), a DEA in the History and Philosophy of Science from the University of Paris I-Sorbonne (1986), and a PhD from the University of Geneva (1988). He also obtained a habilitation to supervise research at the EHESS (2001).

After serving as a tenured researcher at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin (2000-2012), he became a research professor at ICREA in Catalonia and a professor at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, then at Rovira i Virgili University in Tarragona, where he currently works at the Medical Anthropology Research Center. His work focuses on the history of the humanities, neuroscience, and medical anthropology.

Fernando Vidal has received several international honors, including the Latsis University Prize (1994), the Eric T. Carlson Award (2021), and two awards for his books on the history of neuroscience and psychology. Since 2017, he has been an elected member of the Academia Europaea, and since 2020, he has been ranked among the top 2% of the world’s most-cited scientists according to the Stanford/Elsevier ranking.

Collaboration with the Institute for the History of Representations and Ideas in Modernities (IHRIM)

Fernando Vidal’s visit represents a wonderful opportunity for IHRIM due to the strong overlap between his work and several of the laboratory’s research areas, particularly the history of science, the history of ideas, and the construction of intellectual categories.

A renowned specialist in the history of the humanities, medical anthropology, and personal identity, Fernando Vidal develops a transdisciplinary approach that brings together philosophy, theology, medicine, the sciences, and culture. His research project, dedicated to the history of debates on the resurrection of the body, sheds light, over time, on Western conceptions of the subject, the person, and the relationship between body and mind. These questions are directly aligned with the research conducted at IHRIM by Delphine Antoine-Mahut on modern thought and by Samuel Lézé on the history of psychiatry and medical anthropology. His visit will thus foster original scholarly exchanges around the concepts of identity, consciousness, and corporeality.

His contribution to the “Problems of Modernity” seminar, the organization of a symposium and a conference, as well as scheduled meetings with students and researchers, will help strengthen the laboratory’s research momentum and foster collaborations within ENS de Lyon.

Major publications

• Georges Schehadé y Sofía Maffei, la poesía y el sueño (Buenos Aires/Bogotá, Abisinia Editorial, 2025).
• Performing Brains on Screen (Amsterdam, Amsterdam University Press, 2022).
• F. Vidal and F. Ortega. Being Brains: Making the Cerebral Subject (New York, Fordham University Press, 2017). Paperback, 2019. Trans. into Portuguese and Spanish.
• The Sciences of the Soul: the Early Modern Origins of Psychology (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2011). Paperback, 2020.
• Les Sciences de l’âme, XVI^e-XVIII^e siècles (Paris, Champion, 2006)
• Piaget Before Piaget (Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1994). Trans. into Spanish.