Francesco Cataldi

I am a historian of philosophy and science specializing in the Early Modern period. I am currently a PhD Fellow at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, where I work on the BOF research project Contra Isaac Newton: British (Natural) Philosophical and Poetic Criticism of Newton’s Natural Philosophy and Natural Philosophical Methods, 1672–c.1750, and a Visiting PhD Candidate at Erasmus University Rotterdam. I obtained my BA degree in Philosophy (2017) and my MA degree in Philosophical Sciences (History of Philosophy and Science curriculum) (2023) from the University of Catania. My PhD research focuses on Margaret Cavendish’s anti-mathematical and anti-abstractionist natural philosophy.

Besides this, my research lies at the intersection of the history of political philosophy and the history of philosophy of science, with a particular focus on seventeenth- and eighteenth-century philosophy and on the Scottish and Italian Enlightenments, on which I have published most of my work. I am also interested in the ways Early Modern moral and political philosophy was shaped by engagements with ancient philosophical traditions, particularly Aristotelianism and Hellenistic thought, as well as by Newtonian and anti-Newtonian epistemological frameworks. I am also interested in methodological and historiographical approaches within the history of philosophy.