I am a PhD student working on medieval science, more specifically physics and metaphysics. I am especially interested in big systems of metaphysics and their endurance in history.
For my dissertation, I wrote a comparative study looking at 300 medieval arguments for the existence of God in Hebrew, Arabic and Latin. I chose arguments for the existence of God because to me they are the perfect combination of physics and metaphysics. Each argument looks at something other than God to prove his existence, usually the physical world, but sometimes a more general ontology. I created a database for these arguments and I catalogued them according to the commitments they make in their premises, so for example, the concept of matter and the concept of modality- what is possible, necessary and impossible, but also more trivial things like when and where was the argument composed. I then manipulated the database to show trends and to use the arguments as data. This allowed me to trace the metaphysical systems through more than 1000 years without losing perspective of individual writers.
