Nicola Bonatti, M.Phil.

I'm a doctorate fellow at the Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy -- working under the supervision of Prof. DDr. Hannes Leitgeb and Dr. Norbert Gratzl. Before that, I received an MPhil degree in Philosophy from the University of St. Andrews, which is divided into a taught and research year. Earlier, I was a Philosophy undergrad at the University San Raffaele in Milan. Since then, I'm committed to the spread of philosophy outside academia, engaging with both younger and older audiences about topics like the analytic tradition and the riddles of mathematical philosophy.

Research Interests

My research focuses on the philosophy of logic and mathematics, as linked by semantic and epistemological concerns about meaning and understanding. On the one hand, I'm interested in how reasoning about arbitrary instances is adopted for logical and mathematical proofs. More precisely, in my MPhil dissertation, I compared the expressive resources of the classical quantifiers Ɐ and Ǝ with that of Hilbert's epsilon-operator -- i.e. a choice operator extending First-order logic. On the other hand, for my PhD dissertation, I'm investigating the role of formalization in the epistemology of mathematics. More precisely, I consider how to evaluate the adequacy of axiomatic theories with respect to their intended interpretations.

Selected Publications

• Bonatti, Nicola (2022). A Reassessment of Cantorian Abstraction based on the ε -operator. Synthese 200 (5):1-26.