Francesca Biagioli
University of Konstanz, Zukunftskolleg
Fall Term 2015
Mathematical and Transcendental Method in Ernst Cassirer’s Philosophy of Science

Francesca completed her PhD at the University of Turin, Italy, in 2012. Her dissertation was devoted to the debate about non-Euclidean geometry in neo-Kantianism. A reworked English version of her dissertation is under contract for publication under the title Helmholtz on Space, Number, and Geometry in the Springer series Archimedes: New Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology. She has been working on a research project about Ernst Cassirer’s philosophy of science in connection with contemporary debates about the relativized a priori and structural realism as a DAAD Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Paderborn, Germany, in 2012-13, and, afterwards, in several multidisciplinary environments: the New Europe College in Bucharest, Romania, the Mediterranean Institute for Advanced Research of the Aix-Marseille University, France, the Centre for History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Leeds, UK. She is a Zukunftskolleg Incoming Fellow–Marie Curie at the Zukunftskolleg at the University of Konstanz since August 2014.

Her publications include: “Hermann Cohen and Alois Riehl on Geometrical Empiricism” HOPOS: The Journal of the International Society for the History of Philosophy of Science (2014), “What Does It Mean That ‘Space Can Be Transcendental Without the Axioms Being So’? Helmholtz’s Claim in Context” Journal for General Philosophy of Science (2014), “Between Kantianism and Empiricism: Otto Hölder’s Philosophy of Geometry” Philosophia Scientiae (2013), Ernst Cassirer – Leonard Nelson: Una controversia sul metodo critico (Cassirer-Nelson selected writings translated and edited with an introductory essay by Francesca Biagioli) Brescia 2011.

2015/16 Update

My papers in preparation include: two papers on Cassirer and contemporary philosophy of science, which I am planning to submit to peer-reviewed journals while in Pittsburgh, “Cohen and Helmholtz on the Foundations of Measurement” (forthcoming in Veröffentlichungen des Instituts Wiener Kreis – Springer volume devoted to Philosophie und Wissenschaft bei Hermann Cohen), “Intuition and Conceptual Construction in Weyl’s Analysis of the Problem of Space” (forthcoming in Studies in History and Philosophy of Science – Springer volume devoted to Weyl and the Problem of Space).

Together with Marco Giovanelli (Universiy of Tübingen, Forum Scientiarum), I am organizing an international conference on “Neo-Kantian Perspectives on the Exact Sciences,” to be held in Konstanz in January 2016.

In the spring of 2016, I will be visiting the Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy at the Ludwig-Maximilians Universität in Munich.