Other Research Areas

 OTHER RESEARCH AREAS

1. HISTORY OF SCIENTIFIC AND PHILOSOPHICAL THOUGHTS 

History of Electromagnetism ‒ The paper examines the role that Italy played in the development of electromagnetism in the nineteenth century, in order to re-evaluate the importance of the Italian scientific community in Europe. In particular, I show the personal intellectual interactions of English physicists such as Maxwell and Faraday with Italian mathematicians, thanks to the discovery of some hitherto unknown letters by Maxwell and other important records in the archives of the University of Pavia.

History of Structural Realism ‒ The aim of my paper was to show that a structuralist approach to the problem of objecthood was already there to be found in Herbart’s metaphysics. His kind of realism is grounded in a Kantian framework in which the object is an unknown and unknowable ‘x’ about which we can only predicate relations. I claimed that in this respect it is possible to detect some analogies between Herbart’s view and contemporary epistemic structural realism (ESR), according to which we can know only the structures obtaining in this world. However, I also pointed out some important differences due to the fact that Herbart committed himself to the existence of things-in-themselves, while ESR can be interpreted as agnostic with respect to the ontology of the world. The paper was published in a peer-reviewed journal.

2. EPISTEMOLOGY

The method of analogy -  Currently, I am also working on a project run by prof. Ladislav Kvasz at the Centre of Formal Epistemology of the Czech Academy of Sciences. My contribution consists in juxtaposing epistemological accounts of the method by analogy with its applications in physical practice. The method of analogy contributes to scientific progress due to its role in explanatory unification across different fields of physical inquiry. We must, therefore, investigate its justification. My claim is that while in formal epistemology the method by analogy is erroneously held to be based upon a reasoning incorporated in inductive logic, in physical practice this method is grounded in objective criteria underlying classifications of physical quantities and their mathematical representation. In my project, I analyse two cases in which the method of analogy has been employed (Maxwell’s development of electromagnetic theory and Schrödinger’s application of Hamilton’s optical-mechanical analogy) and I explain the classification of quantities upon which their justifications are based.