About:

I am a PhD student in History of Philosophical and Scientific Thought at the Northwestern Italian Philosophy Consortium. I received a BA in Philosophy (2019) and an MA in History of Early-Modern Philosophy (2022) from the University of Turin.

I am interested in the history of mathematical epistemology between the sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries. My PhD research explores the role that the epistemic notion of ‘self-evidence’ played in the late 17th-century debates on the foundations of demonstrative knowledge, particularly Euclidean geometry, focusing on authors such as Descartes, Arnauld and Leibniz.

My supervisors are Antonella Del Prete (University of Turin) and Vincenzo De Risi (Laboratorie SPHere/Université Paris Cité).

However, I like snooping around and engaging in side projects: I run a Renaissance Latin workshop for undergrads that focuses on sixteenth-century Humanistic philosophy; I am one of the editors of utsophiapoesis, an online bibliography on the interplay between poetry and philosophy in the Early-Modern period; I am one of the organizers of twist! (Turin Post-Graduate Workshop in the History of Thought), an annual seminar on Early-Modern and Contemporary intellectual history. More recently, I have begun exploring the intertwining between the history of classical scholarship and analytic philosophy.

Talks:

Upcoming: 

1. Res per se notæ. Descartes' theory of definition and Arnauld's epistemology of fundamental mathematical propositions, HOPOS 2024: The Fifteenth Biennial Congress of the International Society for the History of Philosophy of Science, University of Vienna, Vienna, July 2024.
   

Past:

1. Arma bianca: Chiarezza di stile e sociologia della filosofia nel Grand Siècle, "Style" in Philosophy Seminar, University of Turin, Turin, April 12, 2024.
   
2. Descartes' early thoughts on 'self-evidence', FINO June Seminar, University of Eastern Piedmont, Villa San Remigio, Verbania-Pallanza, June 26, 2023;
3. L'evidenza in Descartes: Tre tratti salienti, FINO Work in Progress Seminar - History, University of Turin, Turin, May 26, 2023:
4. Sub specie fortunæ. Descartes e il significato filosofico del termine 'chiarezza', His/Tho Seminar, University of Turin, Turin, May 11, 2023.

Papers:

1. Pignatelli, Giuseppe. 2023. "Nose of Wax. Early-Modern Philosophy and the Discourse of Conceptual Hybridization'. Journal of Interdisciplinary History of Ideas 11 (22): 1-31. https://doi.org/10.13135/2280-8574/7328