Álvaro José Campillo Bo

My PhD research has been carried at University College Dublin, fully-funded by the Irish Research Council  and developed in collaboration with the European Research Council Grant NeoplAT. It focuses on the legacy of Proclus’ Commentary on Euclid in Renaissance and Early Modern philosophical and mathematical thought.

Alessandro Piccolomini’s (1508-1579) reception of Proclus’ In Euclidem in his work De certitudine mathematicarum (1547) triggered one of the most critical debates in the early modern history of science: the question of the certainty of mathematics. Using Proclus, Piccolomini undermined the scientific status of mathematics, claiming it was not an actual science. The object of my research is to reassess the history of mathematical certainty and its relation to demonstrative means in the early modern period (16th- to 18th-century), going from Piccolomini and Francesco Barozzi (1537-1604) to Isaac Barrow (1630-1677) and Isaac Newton (1643-1727).