Benjamin Wilck

by Rodrigo Ballon Villanueva

Benjamin Wilck

This month, we are happy to introduce you to Benjamin Wilck. Since October 2022, Benjamin has been a postdoctoral scholar at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem (Israel), more specifically within the Martin Buber Society of Fellows in the Humanities and Social Sciences. He is broadly interested in the interrelations between ancient Greek and Roman philosophy and science, as well as in contemporary philosophy of mathematics. Benjamin mainly focuses on how definitions are established, revised, and used in scientific theories.

In 2022, Benjamin was awarded his PhD in Philosophy from Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin (Germany), where he previously obtained two MAs – one in Philosophy and one in Cultural Studies and Aesthetics (2014). His doctoral dissertation, ‘Definitions in Euclid’s Elements: A Philosophical Analysis’, was supervised by Jonathan Beere (Berlin) and Benjamin Morison (Princeton). Here, Benjamin explores the relationship between Euclid’s mathematical practice and Aristotle’s ontology and theory of science. He argues that Euclid systematically uses linguistically different types of definitions for ontologically different kinds of mathematical objects. In doing so, Euclid introduces conceptual and explanatory hierarchies among such objects by arranging their definitions in strictly ordered sequences. By providing a typology and taxonomy of the definitions within the Elements, Benjamin highlights their significance for Euclid’s mathematical proofs. On top of this, Benjamin also studies Euclid’s reception in late ancient and medieval translators/commentators within Latin, Arabic, and Hebrew traditions. Currently, he is turning his monumental dissertation into two monographs. Some of this work has already been published, and you can take a look at it by clicking here.

In addition to his work on Euclid, Benjamin has published a paper titled ‘Can the Pyrrhonian Sceptic Suspend Belief Regarding a Scientific Definition?’ (History of Philosophy and Logical Analysis, 2020). He proposes the arguments against particular scientific definitions found in Sextus Empiricus’ Adversus Mathematicos are not instances of negative dogmatism; rather, they must be understood as sceptical pro-and-contra arguments. Finally, Benjamin is also working on several other papers, for example, one on dialectic and induction in Aristotle, claiming that Aristotle does not restrict dialectical arguments to deductive ones.