Please join us for this week's History of Philosophy Works-in-Progress Luncheon, cosponsored by Physis! This week's presenter is Dr. Álvaro José Campillo Bo (Department of Philosophy, University College Dublin), who will present "On the Grammar of Certainty: Alessandro Piccolomini, the 'Simplician' Proclus, and the Un-scientificity of Mathematics" (see abstract below).
Each meeting consists of a presentation by a graduate student, visiting scholar, or faculty member on a project that they are working on in the history of philosophy, followed by a period of comments/questions from other participants. The workshop is designed to give contributors the opportunity to develop ideas and receive helpful feedback on projects/papers in a friendly and low stakes environment.
Lunch is provided for registered attendees.
Abstract: Alessandro Piccolomini’s (1508-1578) De certitudine mathematicarum (1547) can be considered one of the most relevant chapters in the Renaissance reception of Proclus' philosophy of mathematics and also as one of the most important texts in the early modern philosophy of mathematics. In it, Piccolomini used Proclus' Commentary on Euclid to defend a prima facie paradoxical conclusion with which mathematicians would be bound to wrestle for two centuries, namely that mathematical demonstrations do not fulfil the criteria for being truly scientific. In this talk, I will address some of the interpretative keys providing a better understanding of Piccolomini's reading of Proclus' text and its paradoxical conclusions, proposing that they are illuminated by taking Piccolomini's 'Simplician' Averroist background into consideration.