Dr Chiara Martini

I am an Early Career Research Fellow in Philosophy at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. My main research interest is in ancient philosophy of physics and mathematics. 

Before coming to Cambridge, I was a departmental lecturer at the University of Oxford (Somerville college), where I also did my DPhil (i.e. PhD). My thesis is titled 'Fiction and Reality in Aristotle's Philosophy of Geometry', and it investigates the relation between Aristotle's philosophy of geometry and his physics. In particular, I am interested in the relation between physical and geometrical modality, and how geometry applies to the physical world. In the thesis, I wonder whether Aristotle can legitimately take it for granted that geometry will be applicable to the physical world, given his metaphysical commitments on the one hand, and his very peculiar cosmology and physics on the other. I conclude that for Aristotle, the applicability of geometry to physics is much more restricted than we would think: it is localised both from a spatial and from a temporal point view.