Biography
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.
Research
My work on Aristotle is part of a broader research project on ancient philosophies of space: in the past I have worked on Epicurus' notion of void and I plan to extend this line of inquiry to cover Stoic physics, too. I am particularly fascinated by non-standard accounts of space and place, and interested in the various ways in which mathematics can be used to model, understand and change the physical world. I believe that focusing on ancient theories of physics and mathematics is not merely of historical interest, and I try to connect my work in ancient philosophy to open issues in contemporary philosophy of mathematics.
