The monthly seminar "Early Science in Conversation" invites experts from different fields and with varied perspectives to examine the ways in which science defines itself and what the history of science is as a discipline. We will especially encourage collective reasoning about conceptions of science and the methodologies with which we inquire about our sources. Among other things, we will reflect on what have been regarded as premodern scientific and proto-scientific practices, their methods, and their techniques. This interdisciplinary encounter seeks to deepen the history of science’s awareness of its own agenda and to open up new pathways. The conversational format, along with lectures and discussions of work in progress, aims to build fruitful connections across the intellectual spectrum of the MPIWG.