The focus of my research
concerns the complex relations between the history of philosophy and the
history of science.
I am especially interested in the history of the concept of
space in connection with the development of geometry and related sciences. My foremost
contribution to the topic is my book Geometry
and Monadology, in which I attempt a new interpretation of Leibniz’s
metaphysics in the light of his geometrical writings on the analysis situs, and also to articulate his contribution to the birth of modern
geometry.
In connection with this project, I have also worked on the
development of elementary geometry from the Renaissance to the modern age; on
historical epistemology and the foundations of mathematics; on the mathematical
theory of perspective in the 16th-18th centuries; and on
the rise of non-Euclidean geometries. My second book is an
Italian translation and commentary on Gerolamo Saccheri’s Euclides Vindicatus.
I am also pursuing projects that concern the history of topology and the epistemology of space at the beginning of the 20th century, the debate on conventionalism, and the philosophy of mathematics in the Vienna Circle, Cassirer, and Husserl.
My current research is especially focused on
the history of German mathematics in the late 18th century in
connection with Kant’s theory of geometry and space. I would like to attempt a
reading of Kant’s epistemology and theoretical philosophy by way of his
conception of geometry.
Vincenzo De Risi graduated in both philosophy and mathematics at the University
of Rome, and got his Ph.D. in philosophy at the Scuola Normale Superiore in
Pisa. He held a one-year fellowship at the Istituto Italiano per gli Studi
Storici in Naples, a DAAD fellowship at the Leibniz-Archiv in Hannover, and was
visiting scholar at the History and Philosophy of Science Dept. of Pittsburgh University, as well as at the Warburg Institute in London. Before joining the MPIWG, he held a three-year
position as Junior Fellow in history of logic and philosophy of science at the
Scuola Normale Superiore, and was for one year Humboldt Research Fellow at the
Technische Universität Berlin.
