Dr. Idit Chikurel

I am a postdoctoral fellow of the Minerva Stiftung. I obtained a PhD in Philosophy of Science (2019), an M.A. in the History and Philosophy of Science and Ideas (2011) and a B.A. in Psychology and Women & Gender Studies (2005), all at Tel Aviv University. I conducted several postdoctoral projects at the University of Hamburg, University of Potsdam, Max Planck Institute of Science, Humboldt University and ETH Zurich. I was recently a guest lecturer at Berlin Institute of Technology and the University of Potsdam, and formerly an exchange graduate student at Paris-Sorbonne – Paris IV University.

Research interests

My research interests are in the philosophy and history of mathematics, philosophy of science, history of philosophy and the employment of scientific knowledge in Jewish philosophy. I focus on epistemological and metaphysical questions, and on the use of mathematical knowledge in the construction of philosophical arguments. In my current project I explore the roles of grounds and consequences in ampliative analysis, comparing Salomon Maimon’s ampliative analysis based on intuition and diagrams with Bernard Bolzano’s ampliative analysis based on interchangeability of concepts. My inquiry builds upon mathematical examples of ampliative reasoning.

Publications

• Salomon Maimon's Theory of Invention: Scientific Genius, Analysis and Euclidean Geometry. Berlin/Boston: Walter de Gruyter, 2020.
• "Analysis and Necessity in Arithmetic in Light of Maimon's Concept of Number as Ratio", Kant-Studien [Forthcoming]
• "Scepticism and Certainty in Maimon's Theory of Invention", Tolerance and Scepticism: Moses Mendelssohn, Salomon Maimon and the Philosophy of Jewish Enlightenment, Ze'ev Strauss & Michah Gottlieb (Eds.), The Maimonides Library for Philosophy and Religion. Leiden: Brill [Forthcoming].
• “Ma’aseh Choshev” [a critical edition of Maimon’s algebra textbook], In: Reihe II: Hebräische Schriften, Band I: 1778, Maimon Gesamtausgabe, Yitzhak Y. Melamed and Ives Radrizzani (Eds.), Frommann-Holzboog Verlag [In progress].