Pasquale Viola

by Rodrigo Ballon Villanueva

Pasquale Viola

It is time to bid farewell to 2025. This year, we had the chance to meet an impressive list of early-career scholars. And, to tell you the ‘truth’, this makes us very much look forward to the next one! With this in mind, we are happy to introduce you this month to Pasquale Viola, whose research focuses precisely on this notion.

Pasquale holds a BA in Philosophy (2022) jointly awarded by the University of Naples Federico II (Italy) and the Pontifical University of St. Thomas Aquinas – the Angelicum (Italy). Subsequently, he was awarded an MA in Philosophy (2024) by the University of Italian Switzerland (Switzerland). At present, he is a second-year PhD student in Philosophy at the University of Barcelona (Spain), working within the ERC project ‘Truth in Ancient and Medieval Philosophy’ (TAMP), under the supervision of Tamer Nawar. In addition, he is also a member of the Logos Research Group, which is associated with the Barcelona Institute of Analytic Philosophy.

In his doctoral dissertation, Pasquale conducts a multidimensional study of 14th-century theories of truth. Thus, he analyses the role of Oxonian medieval logicians in reshaping the classical correspondence notion of truth (e.g., Richard Brinkley and Richard Ferrybridge). Likewise, he pays attention to those who rejected it alongside supposition theory (e.g., Henry Hopton), leaving the door open to a new conception of truth. Because of this, Pasquale also deals with their treatment of the liar paradox, since it provided key counterexamples that motivated a reassessment of their conception(s) of truth. At last, he examines how adopting a particular notion of truth affected the way in which issues in metaphysical modality and logic were conceived. This includes the problem of future contingents and the validity of classical logical principles, such as bivalence and the law of excluded middle. In this respect, he goes beyond the post-Ockham tradition at Oxford, comprising the post-Auriol tradition at Paris.

If you are interested in keeping up to date with Pasquale’s research, take a look at his institutional page!