Riccardo Strobino, Recalibrating the Scale of Logic: Avicenna on the Canon of Scientific Reasoning

Riccardo Strobino (Tufts University) visits U of T for a research talk on Recalibrating the Scale of Logic: Avicenna on the Canon of Scientific Reasoning. Join in person on Monday, March 4 at 4 pm in the Great Hall at CMS or virtually via Zoom (https://utoronto.zoom.us/j/83468869556).

Biography

Riccardo Strobino is an Associate Professor of Classical Studies and Philosophy at Tufts University, where he previously held the A.W. Mellon Assistant Professorship in Greco-Roman and Arabic studies from 2015 to 2021.  His research interests lie in the history of logic and its intersection with metaphysics and epistemology in the classical and post-classical Islamicate world, in the Latin West and in the Ancient and Late Ancient Greek tradition. Before  joining Tufts, he was a visiting lecturer at UCLA in 2014. He also held post-doctoral fellowships at Scuola Normale Superiore (2010-2012) including a research period in Damascus, at the University of Bochum, and at the University of Cambridge (2012-2015), working on an international joint DFG-AHRC project on Arabic logic and philosophy of language. In addition to numerous articles on the history of logic on the three traditions, he is the author of Avicenna’s Theory of Science: Logic, Metaphysics, Epistemology, University of California Press  (2021). His current book projects include a translation with introduction and commentary of Themistius’s Paraphrasis of Aristotle’s Posterior Analytics for the Bloomsbury Ancient Commentators series; a monograph with Brill on the 14th-century Latin theory of logical obligations; an edited volume on Arabic logic and philosophy with Asad Q. Ahmed and Mohammad S. Zarepour; and a co-authored translation with George E. Smith of Isaac Newton’s De motu corporum in gyrum. He has been awarded the prize for best dissertation in philosophy at Scuola Normale Superiore in 2010, residential fellowships at the Harvard Center for Italian Renaissance Studies in Florence, Villa I Tatti (2017–2018) and at the Harvard Center for Hellenic Studies in Washington DC (2023). Riccardo is thrilled to come back to Toronto for this research talk, after spending here the fall of 2022 as visiting professor to teach a graduate seminar on Avicenna’s metaphysics.