Network

A researcher can only aim to be as good as the colleagues that surrounds her/him! Let me introduce you to some early-career scholars.

Davide Falessi

Davide is a PhD student in a joint programme between the University of Lucerne and the École Pratique des Hautes Études in Paris. He is interested  in the relationship between logic and metaphysics and his doctoral research is dedicated to the several senses of being in late medieval philosophy within a broad project titled Senses of Being. The Medieval Reception of Aristotle’s doctrine starting from Metaphysics V 7.

One of his main interests is continuity and, more in detail, the opposition between a realist and a nominalist account of points in a continuum. Starting from that, his research is focused on the notion of infinity and on the role of logic, especially modal logic, for the explanation of the ontological status of the indivisible and the set-up of the structure of a continuous quantity.


Kamil Majcherek

Kamil has just defended a dissertation on Medieval Metaphysics of Artefacts 1250-1500 at the University of Toronto. His main interests lie in late medieval metaphysics and natural philosophy, as well as palaeography and textual editing, since his research draws extensively on manuscript sources. He also has a secondary interest in late scholasticism.

From July 2022, he will be a Junior Research Fellow at Trinity College, Cambridge, where his main new project will concern late medieval debates about the ontological status of numbers: whether numbers are entities distinct from numbered things, and if so, what they are and how they exist.


Andrei Marinca

Andrei is an associate professor at Babeș-Bolyai University (Cluj, Romania). He recently defended his Phd thesis Debates on the Continuum in the Natural Philosophy of XIVth Century. His research interests focus on the history of medieval atomism, Arabic philosophy, and the history of medieval universities.


Nicola Polloni

Nicola is one of the most indefatigable researchers I have ever met. A quick look at his website, Potestas essendi, will give you an idea of the many and multifaceted projects he is involved with. He is currently carrying out his own research project titled The Shadow Within Nature: Epistemology and ontology of prime matter in the late Middle Ages. In a nutshell, he is focusing on the late medieval ontological debate on prime matter in relation to the epistemological problem of prime matter’s knowability.

Recently, I have been invited to discuss about the theories of matter developed by 12-th Chartrian masters for The Elusive Substrate. This has been a long and passionate speculative journey involving many other scholars and aiming at reconstructing the the basic ontological constitution of the universe envisioned by ancient, medieval, and modern philosophers. 


Sylvain Roudaut

Sylvain is a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Philosophy at Stockholm University. Together with Henrik Lagerlund and Erik Åkerlund, he is currently working on the research project The Mechanization of Philosophy, 1300-1700. His main research interests are the interaction between natural philosophy, metaphysics and mathematics in the Middle Ages. More precisely, he is currently investigating the increasing importance of mechanical explanations in late medieval thought focusing on three interrelated themes: the increasing reduction of formal causality to efficient causation; the evolution of theories of material substances; the quantification of natural properties.

Sylvan Roudaut, Cecilia Trifogli and I are presenting a panel dedicated to the interplay of medieval mathematics and physics at the next 2022 SIEPM congress, which will take place in Paris.


Zita Toth

Zita is currently Lecturer in History of Philosophy at King’s College, London. Zita, Sylvain Roudaut, and and I are part of a reading group on Walter Burley’s De formis – and yes, there are some interesting reflections on quantity within this text! She .

Zita has been a postdoctoral research fellow at the De Wulf-Mansion Centre for Ancient, Medieval and Renaissance Philosophy at KU Leuven. She worked on the project called ‘Hylomorphism Whole: 1300–1330’, which aims to study medieval hylomorphism without its usual compartmentalization. As she describes herself on her website, she is indeed a ‘wandering academic’! Just to mention a few of her wanderings, she taught philosophy and mathematics in Missouri and worked on the Richard Rufus Project at Indiana University.


And many to come…