I teach and work on logic and metaphysics. Before coming to Amsterdam, I’ve been doing more or less the same at the University of Aberdeen UK, at the Institute for Advanced Study, University of Notre Dame IN-USA, at the Sorbonne-Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris, at the Universities of Padua, Venice and Milan-San Raffaele in Italy.
I love logical paradoxes, impossible worlds, nonexistent objects, and philosophers who don’t take themselves too seriously.
2016-21 Five-year ERC Consolidator grant at the Institute for Logic, Language and Computation (ILLC): "The Logic of Conceivability", € 2.000.000.
2013-15 Two-year AHRC Early Career Researcher grant at the University of Aberdeen: "The Metaphysical Basis of Logic", £ 240.000.
2010-12 Two-year research grant at the Department of Philosophy, University of Venice: "The Gödel Paradox and Wittgenstein's Reasons", € 28.000.
2010-11 One-year research fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Study, University of Notre Dame (USA), $ 58.000.
2010 Ca' Foscari Research Prize, University of Venice, € 10.000.
I run the entries "Dialetheism" (with Graham Priest), "Cellular Automata" (with Jacopo Tagliabue), and "Impossible Worlds" of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
I have refereed for Analytic Philosophy, Australasian Journal of Logic, Australasian Journal of Philosophy, Dialectica, Disputatio, Erkenntnis, International Studies in the Philosophy of Science, Journal of Philosophical Logic, Logica Universalis, Logique et Analyse, Mind, Philosophical Quarterly, Philosophical Studies, Review of Symbolic Logic, Southern Journal of Philosophy, Synthèse, Thought, Continuum-Bloomsbury, Oxford University Press.
"The human imagination remains one of the last uncharted territories of the mind."
– Ruth Byrne, The Rational Imagination
I have been given nearly 2.000.000 Euro's by the European Research Council for this Consolidator grant, lasting for five years (2017-2021) and hosted by the Institute for Logic, Language and Computation. Here's a short summary of the project:
Our mind represents non-actual scenarios to extract information from them. We cannot experience beforehand which situations are or will be actual. So we explore them in our imagination, leaving our perceptions offline: ‘What would happen if...?’. The cognitive importance of this activity is hardly overestimated. But what is its logic? The orthodox logical treatment of representational mental states comes from modal logic’s possible worlds semantics: the modal analysis of knowledge, belief, information, was taken up by philosophy, linguistics, and Artificial Intelligence. However, the approach faces major problems. By systematically addressing them, the Logic of Conceivability (LoC) project will yield a paradigm shift in our understanding of the logic of human imagination. One major purely logical problem is that mainstream epistemic logics model cognitive agents as logically omniscient, thus as disconnected from the reality of human, fallible minds. One major philosophical problem concerns the entailment from conceivability to so-called absolute possibility in ‘thought experiments’ of theoretical philosophy: how does conceiving a scenario give evidence of its possibility? LoC will address such issues via the techniques of non-classical logics with non-normal worlds semantics. It will make logically precise the distinction, taken from cognitive science, between Fast Thinking (associative, context-sensitive) and Slow Thinking (rule-based, analytic). It will show how omniscience is avoided, and evidence of absolute possibility is achieved, in different manners in the Fast and Slow Way. Based at the Institute for Logic, Language and Computation, and advised by a Board of researchers from Europe, the US, and Australia, LoC will deliver high-impact outputs in top journals, a book, and knowledge dissemination results for non-specialists. |
The LoC Project will host four sub-projects, within some of which researchers will be hired:
|
Title |
Duration |
Sub-Project 1: |
LoC I: Foundations4-year Post-doc 1 (Logic, Analytic Philosophy)
|
Year 1 to 4 (2017-20) |
Sub-Project 2: |
LoC II: Core Theory & Applications4-year Post-doc 2 (Cognitive Science) 4-year Post-doc 3 (Mathematical Logic and AI)
|
Year 2 to 5 (2018-21) |
Sub-Project 3: |
Loc III: Conceivability and Possibility4-year PhD candidate (Logic and Philosophy)
|
Year 1 to 4 (2017-20) |
Sub-Project 4: |
LoC IV: the LoC Book
|
Years 4 and 5 (2020-21) |