Dr Salvatore Florio has been awarded a Leverhulme Trust Research Fellowship for the project ‘The Many and the One: A Philosophical Study’.

Plural expressions play a key role in thought and language. They enable us to convey information about collections of objects and their properties (e.g. ‘some critics admire only one another’), and they generate valid patterns of reasoning, forming the subject of a new branch of logic known as plural logic.

For this fellowship, awarded £25,483 by the Leverhulme Trust, Dr Florio will develop a novel perspective on plural logic and re-assess its applications and philosophical significance, particularly in relation to metaphysics, semantics and the philosophy of mathematics. The project will bridge the current gap between linguistic and philosophical approaches to plurals, advancing our understanding of a fundamental tool in reasoning.

The main output from the project will be a monograph, co-authored with Professor Øystein Linnebo at the University of Oslo, Norway. The one-year fellowship will begin in September 2017.

Dr Florio’s fellowship is one of three successful Leverhulme-funded research fellowships in the College of Arts and Law, the other two being Dr Ita Mac Carthy (Modern Languages) and Dr David Hemsoll (Art History).