Nicola Bonatti, MPhil

Personal information

I'm Nicola Bonatti, doctoral fellow at the Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy, where I'm pursuing my PhD under the supervision of Prof. Hannes Leitgeb. I’m also a researcher in the DFG-funded project "New Perspectives on the Semantics of the Epsilon Calculus", led by Dr. Norbert Gratzl. Before that, I got my MPhil degree in Philosophy from the University of St. Andrews, which is divided into a taught and research year. Earlier, I was a Philosophy undergrad at the University San Raffaele in Milan.

Research interests

My primary research interests lie in logic and the philosophy of mathematics. In my PhD thesis, I explore historical, philosophical, and mathematical aspects of extremal axioms, i.e., principles that impose either minimality or maximality conditions on the admissible models of an axiomatic theory. This research is closely connected to the literature on structuralism in the philosophy of mathematics, including the axiomatic method, implicit definitions, and categoricity. Instead, as part of the DFG project, I’m working on a Kripke-style semantics for a conservative extension of Intuitionistic Free Logic with Hilbert’s epsilon-operator. This line of research is primarily motivated by concerns about choice principles and arbitrariness in non-classical settings.

Selected publications

• Nicola Bonatti (2025). What are Extremal Axioms?, Philosophia Mathematica. https://doi.org/10.1093/philmat/nkaf020
• Nicola Bonatti (2022). A Reassessment of Cantorian Abstraction based on the ε-operator, Synthese 200, 396. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-022-03840-6