My main academic interests are in the Philosophy and History of Science. My research focuses on how new scientific concepts are conceived and justified in connection with novel measurement procedures and instruments. I'm currently a Visiting Postdoctoral Fellow at the Max-Planck Institute for the History of Science (MPIWG) in Berlin (Research Group: "Practices of Validation in the Biomedical Sciences”).
Before this, I studied Philosophy at the University of Milan and at the Central European University in Budapest, where I obtained my PhD in 2020. In my PhD dissertation, I have argued that certain elements of scientific practice are ‘constit…
My main academic interests are in the Philosophy and History of Science. My research focuses on how new scientific concepts are conceived and justified in connection with novel measurement procedures and instruments. I'm currently a Visiting Postdoctoral Fellow at the Max-Planck Institute for the History of Science (MPIWG) in Berlin (Research Group: "Practices of Validation in the Biomedical Sciences”).
Before this, I studied Philosophy at the University of Milan and at the Central European University in Budapest, where I obtained my PhD in 2020. In my PhD dissertation, I have argued that certain elements of scientific practice are ‘constitutive’ in coordination. This means that some elements provide certain conditions for applying abstract representations to concrete phenomena in certain scientific contexts. In other words, these elements function as provisional ‘anchors’ that are assumed at different stages of a coordination process, so that a stable condition of justification can be obtained. In the light of my examples from the history of the physical and biological sciences, I suggest that there are at least three qualitatively different kinds of constitutive elements: domain-specific theoretical principles, material elements, and domain-general assumptions underlying reasoning abilities. In 2017-18, I was a DAAD-funded Visiting Fellow at the Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy at the LMU Munich, where I also conducted archival research on Georg Ohm's laboratory notes at the Deutsches Museum. In 2020-21, I was a Swiss Government Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Geneva, where I worked on the relationship between 19th century craniological measurement and views of intelligence.
My current project at the MPIWG focuses on how construct validation practices were implemented before the scientific literature started explicitly discussing construct validation in the mid-twentieth century. Measurement has a crucial role in a wide variety of epistemic activities in the psychological and biomedical sciences as well as in everyday clinical practice. Yet, several attributes – such as pain or anxiety – are generally viewed as resistant to quantification via measurement of some physical proxy. Since these attributes are unobservable, they are referred to as hypothetical or theoretical constructs, useful in the light of our available theories of those constructs. Construct validation is the practice of testing whether these constructs are adequately capturing the attributes of interest and their quantitative structure. More specifically, my project will analyse what role construct validation practices played in the emergence of early psychophysical concepts. This research will provide an initial grasp of the historically changing and contextually determined character of attempts at validating quantitative constructs in psychophysics before the emergence of construct validation as an explicit epistemic category.
In addition to this, I am working with Matteo De Benedetto (Ruhr Universität Bochum) on evolutionary perspectives on values in science. My academic interests also include topics related to evolutionary biology, the concept of human nature, social anthropology, and the history of 20th century philosophy, especially neo-Kantianism and logical empiricism.
On top of my academic interests, I keep developing my activities as a theatre practitioner, researcher and instructor. My artistic research focuses on theatre practice and pedagogy as tools to explore the connections between (scientific) knowledge, ritual, and society from an embodied perspective. Since 2021, I have been conducting several theatre workshops that take inspiration from the scientific imagery. In 2022, I have developed my first solo performance inspired by my philosophy research. In the spirit of integration, I believe it is crucial to invent and foster new forms of engagement between science, philosophy and society. These include novel teaching formats and creative interactions with the public sphere with pedagogical, social, and self-reflecting purposes, particularly by using powerful alternative tools as theatre laboratories.