Matteo de Ceglie
I am currently a PhD student at the Philosophy Department of the Cultural and Social Science at Salzburg University and a DOC-Scholar of the Austrian Academy of Sciences. I am working on a dissertation project on the set theoretic multiverse, entitled Towards and axiomatization of the set theoretic multiverse. My first advisor is Univ. Prof. Dr. Charlotte Werndl, and my second advisor is Ass. Prof. Dr. Julien Murzi.
I specialise in the Philosophy of Mathematics (Philosophy of Set Theory), and my areas of competence include Logic and Philosophy of Language. My research interests within the Philosophy of Mathematics focus on the pluralism vs. anti-pluralism debate, naturalism and second philosophy, the higher infinite, the Continuum Hypothesis, determinacy and inner models.
After finishing High School in Rome, I won (after a public examination) one of the 27 five year long Full Honour Scholarships at the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa. To maintain this scholarship for five years, the students must have a GPA of 27/30 at the University of Pisa and also prepare (and defend) an annual research paper and two term papers per year (for which the GPA of 27/30 still applies). During my third year I have been an Erasmus student at the Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy, where I have worked on my Bachelor Thesis on Second Order Logic and its application to Graph Theory. Then, during my fifth year, I have been another 6 months abroad, this time as a Visiting Student Researcher at the University of California, Berkeley. In Berkeley, since my major was in Philosophy, I have taken two foundational courses in mathematics (Real Analysis and Abstract Algebra) to gain more expertise in key areas of mathematics and get some official mathematical background. In November 2016 I graduated with a thesis on Pluralism in Philosophy of Mathematics, entitled The existence of alternative set theoretic universes and the Continuum Hypothesis (Official Archive | Preprint). The main topic was the application of pluralistic ideas (the existence of more than one set theoretic universe) to the problem of the Continuum Hypothesis. During the academic year 2018-2018 I was a visiting scholar at the Department of Logic and Philosophy of Science at University of California, Irvine, where I worked on V-logic under the supervision of Prof. Toby Meadows and Prof. Penelope Maddy. I am currently a recipient of a DOC-Scholarship from the Austrian Academy of Sciences for the years 2019-2021. For more details, see my Curriculum Vitae.
My graduate research focuses on the different conceptions of the set-theoretic multiverse. In particular, my research aims to develop a new conception of the multiverse, and produce a workable philosophical account of multiversism. I am interested in justifying a multiverse conception for set theory from a naturalistic point of view and to build an actual theory of the multiverse. For this research, I am working on the issue of the axiomatisation of the hyperuniverse based on V -logic and, more specifically, with reference to alternative formulations of V-logic, I am exploring a ‘tableaux method’ which might be preferable to formulations of V -logic based on natural deduction.
In general, I am mainly interested in questions regarding the philosophy of set theory, the foundations of mathematics, the pluralism/anti-pluralism debate, naturalism and second philosophy, the higher infinite, the continuum hypothesis, determinacy and inner models. My research interests also include intuitionism/constructivism, second order logic, type theory, proof theory, general philosophy of science, the demarcation problem, second order science, intentionality and language learning. I have also a very strong side interest in Linguistics - when I was in Pisa I wrote essays on formal Semantic, typology, computational linguistics and neurolinguistics.