Marco Giovanelli
University of Tübingen, Germany
Academic Year 2013
Lost in Tradition: The Rise of Logical Empiricism at the Juncture of the “Riemannian” and “Helmholtzian” Traditions 

Marco studied at the Universtiy of Turin (Italy) and received his PhD at the University of Zurich (Switzerland). He is currenttly fellow of the Germany Research Foundation (DFG) at the University of Tübingen (Germany). After working on Kant and German Neo-Kantianism (see in particular his book Reality and Negation, Springer, 2011), he moved his interests to the history of the espistemology of geometry, the emergence of Logical Empiricism and in general the early philosophical interpretations of the theory of relativity. His recent publications include:

The Forgotten Tradition: How the Logical Empiricists Missed the Philosophical Significance of the Work of Riemann, Christoffel and Ricci, Erkenntnis; Talking at Cross-Purposes. How Einstein and Logical Empiricists never Agreed on what they were Disagreeing About, Synthese; Erich Kretschmann as a proto-logical-empiricist. Adventures and misadventures of the point-coincidence argument, Studies in the History of Philosophy of Modern Physics; Collision of Traditions: The Emergence of Logical Empiricism Between
the Riemannian and Helmholtzian Traditions (forthcoming).

The common thread of these papers is the attempt to show that the most puzzling features of Logical Empiricists' interpretation of general relativity derive from their insistence to cast Einstein's new theory in the wrong mathematical tradition.