MAP: Courses 2026/2027
Institute of Philosophy
29 aprile 2026
We are very pleased to announce the courses offered at the MAP during the Academic Year 2026/2027!
In the attachment (right column or bottom of the page), you can find the schematic list of courses.
All the descriptions of the courses will soon be available below.
Metaphysics (Core Course 1st year)
Claudio Calosi, Fabrice Correia
Autumn
ECTS 6
Mereology and Location. Parthood and location are among the most central notions in our conceptual scheme. In this seminar we first introduce various formal theories of parthood and location. We then discuss several metaphysical issues regarding both. These include – but are not limited to – atomism, the special composition question and the possibility of multilocation. Finally, we bring the investigation of parthood and location together and discuss different metaphysical debates in which their interaction turns out to be crucial, such as, e.g., the metaphysics of persistence, the possibility of extended simples, and the nature of omnipresent entities – to mention a few.
Evaluation method: essay
Logic (Core Course 1st year)
Alessandro Giordani, Léon Probst (TA)
Autumn
ECTS 6
Modal Logic. Modal logic extends classical logic to capture abstract notions of necessity and possibility, applicable across different areas—including epistemic modalities like knowledge and justification, deontic modalities like obligation and permission, and various kinds of conditionals. This course explores its logical core, based on possible worlds semantics and axiomatic systems; presents basic logical tools and techniques related to proofs of soundness and completeness; and highlights applications in metaphysics, philosophy of science, and philosophy of mind.
Evaluation method: written exam
Philosophy of Mind (Core Course 1st year)
Kevin Mulligan
Autumn
ECTS 6
The course surveys the main distinctions employed in the description and analysis of mental phenomena, states and dispositions from Husserl, James, Moore, Russell and Wittgenstein to Searle, Putnam, Burge and after. It then discusses in some detail ten topics - certainty; perception & transparency; meaning something with an expression and meanings; time-consciousness; reasons, motives, rationality, causes and becauses; knowledge & belief; imagination; mental modes, grammatical moods and modalities; (neo-Jamesian accounts of) emotions; egos, selves, persons and bundles.
Evaluation method: essay
Philosophy of Physics (Core Course 1st year)
Christian Wüthrich
Spring
ECTS 4
This course offers an introduction to the philosophy of physics, which deals with methodological, epistemological, and metaphysical issues in physics. It consists of seven modules offering a rich menu in philosophically deep questions arising in modern physics: space and time, quantum mechanics, and advanced topics of contemporary physics.
The seven modules are as follows:
- Organization and introduction: what is philosophy of physics, what are physical theories, and what is determinism?
- Substantivalism vs relationalism: Newton, Leibniz, Kant, and time in Newtonian physics in general
- Time in special relativity: relativity of simultaneity, Minkowksi spacetime, and implications for the metaphysics of time
- Time in general relativity, cosmology, and beyond
- Moving backward and forward in time: time travel in modern physics
- Quantum mechanics: phenomena and theory
- Quantum mechanics: the measurement problem and quantum non-locality
Accessibility and Prerequisites. This course will be self-contained and has no prerequisites. While some background in physics, mathematics, and philosophy will be helpful, I will not assume any specific knowledge beyond high school mathematics.
Evaluation method: essay
Research Skills in Philosophy (Core Course 1st year)
Paolo Gigli and many guest professors
Autumn
ECTS 4
The aim of this course is to provide the students with some necessary skills to become professional philosophers. Sessions will be devoted to how to read and write academic papers and abstracts, how to give effective talks, how to submit papers to academic journals, how to write research proposals, how to prepare a powerful application for a PhD programme… and much more.
Evaluation method: essay (mock dossier)
Research Seminar (Core Course 2nd year)
Paolo Natali, Lorenzo Lorenzetti
Autumn
ECTS 4
This seminar will take place in September-October, precisely when second-year students are about to apply for challenging PhD programmes. The seminar provides the opportunity to each student to present, discuss and receive substantial feedback on how to improve their writing sample, which is arguably a crucial file in their dossier.
Evaluation method: essay + presentations in class
Topics in Metaphysics (Elective Course 1st and 2nd year)
Stephan Leuenberger
Autumn
ECTS 4
Grounding. In many philosophical contexts, rival theories do not disagree primarily about what the facts are, but about what explanatory relationships hold among the facts. In a famous contrast going back to Plato’s Eutyphro, we might hold that a good action is good because it is loved by the good, or alternatively that a good action is loved by the good because it is good. Similarly, a physicalist and a dualist may agree on what the physical facts are, and what the facts about conscoiusness are, and yet disagree about whether the latter hold in virtue of the former. In the last twenty years, such explanatory but non-causal relationships have become an important metaphysical topic in their own right, and various regimentations of locutions such as ‘because’ or ‘in virtue of’ have been proposed, under the label ‘grounding’.
Today, grounding is part of the standard conceptual repertoire used for articulating philosophical hypotheses and formulating arguments, along with mereology and first-order logic with identity. Regimented concepts of grounding has proved fruitful in a number of debates. (Damiano Costa’s ‘An argument against Aristotelian Universals’, Synthese, 2021) provides a good example).
The aim of this course is to familiarise students with the technical idiom of grounding (expressions such as ‘fully grounds’ and ‘partially grounds’), and with key contemporary theories about the status and features of the corresponding relations. Questions to be discussed include:
- Can grounding be used to define different levels of reality?
- Does Ockham’s razor apply to grounded entities as well as to ungrounded ones?
- Does everything need to be grounded in fundamental facts?
- How does grounding relate to metaphysical dependence?
- What, if any, are the grounds of negative facts?
Evaluation method: essay
Topics in Logic (Elective Course 1st and 2nd year)
Alessandro Giordani, Andrea Salvador (TA)
Spring
ECTS 6
Negation – Logical systems and Metaphysical Foundations. Negation is a key notion in logic and metaphysics. It powers classical systems, where it is understood in terms of the fundamental principle of bivalence, while sparking paradoxes in non-classical systems—like intuitionistic and minimal logics, which reject the principle of excluded middle, or paraconsistent logics, which tolerate true contradictions. This course explores its formal semantics in terms of truth tables, its modal interpretation, and its metaphysical roots: from Aristotle's law of non-contradiction to dialetheism—thus bridging proof-theoretic aspects with debates on the structure of reality.
Evaluation method: take-home exam
Topics in Philosophy of Mind (Elective Course 1st and 2nd year)
Bence Nanay
Autumn
ECTS 4
Emotion and Belief. The aim of this course is to give an interdisciplinary introduction to two central mental phenomena, emotion and belief. It combines philosophical, psychological and neuroscientific approaches to the topic. Besides the classic questions about the metaphysics of emotions and beliefs, special emphasis is given to the intricate connections between the two and also the ways they interact with other mental phenomena, like perception, desires and imagination.
Evaluation method: essay
Topics in Philosophy of Physics (Elective Course 1st and 2nd year)
Francesca Vidotto
Spring
ECTS 4
Cosmology. A number of challenging questions arise in contemporary cosmology, and philosophers can contribute constructively to answering them. The course is designed to be of interest both for the students who took the one on Quantum Gravity in Spring 2026 and those who did not.
Evaluation method: essay, complemented by presentations and quiz tests in class
Topics in Philosophy of Mathematics (Elective Course 1st and 2nd year)
Øystein Linnebo
Spring
ECTS 4
Potentialist and generative approaches to the philosophy and foundations of mathematics. Aristotle famously claimed that the only coherent form of infinity is potential, not actual. However many objects there are, it is possible for there to be yet more; but it is impossible for there actually to be infinitely many objects. Although this view was superseded by Cantor’s transfinite set theory, even Cantor regarded the collection of all sets as “unfinished” or incapable of “being together”. In recent years, there has been a resurgence of interest in potentialist and other generative approaches to the philosophy and foundations of mathematics, according to which an ontology of mathematical objects is successively “generated”, or defined, in an incompletable “process”. The course provides a survey of such approaches, both older and newer, covering (i) Aristotle’s view of infinity; (ii) Cantor’s conception of the transfinite and absolute infinity; (iii) the iterative conception of sets; (iv) potentialism in constructive mathematics; (v) recent potentialist and generative approaches; (vi) the hierarchical conception of reality.
Evaluation method: essay
Logic and Metaphysics (Elective Course 1st and 2nd year)
Franz Berto
Autumn
ECTS 6
The methodology of ontology. The key question of ontology, i.e., the core of metaphysics, for Quine is: ‘What is there?’. The key question of metaontology is: ‘What do we mean when we ask “What is there?”’. Additionally, metaontology is about the methodology of ontology. Should we do it via conceptual analysis? Thought experiments? By looking at our best natural science? By systematizing our intuitions? By examining language use?
Having a sound methodology is part of what makes a discipline serious, and ontology and metaphysics are in bad need of seriousness, having probably the worst press among researchers who are nonphilosophers, of all the parts of philosophy.
This course introduces to metaontology, which encompasses a good deal of the most interesting metaphysical research of the XXI Century. In its first part, we will look at the mainstream view, namely Quinean metaontology, and we will discuss two variants: ontological pluralism and neo-Fregeanism. In its second part, we will present alternative metaontologies, ordering them, roughly, from those that depart less from the mainstream view to those that do it more radically: neo-Carnapianism and deflationism, fictionalism, Meinongianism, grounding theory, naturalized metaphysics. In its third part, we will discuss two applications and case studies: the ontology of possible worlds, which make for the core notion of contemporary modal logic, and that of fictional objects.
Evaluation method: essay
Mind and Metaphysics (Elective Course 1st and 2nd year)
Thomas Sattig
Spring
ECTS 4
Metaphysics and Experience. The course focuses on a question at the intersection of metaphysics, philosophy of mind, and epistemology: What is the relationship between human experiences as of a given phenomenon and the existence and nature of this phenomenon? We will consider this question for the following areas: composition and persistence of material objects, persistence of persons and selves, causation.
Evaluation method: essay
Philosophy and Artificial Intelligence (Elective Course 1st and 2nd year)
Barry Smith, Jobst Landgrebe
Spring
ECTS 4
This course will provide an introduction to AI and to the impacts of AI on the wider world. It is designed to be of interest to both philosophers and those with a background in computer science.
Evaluation method: essay
Philosophy of Physics and Metaphysics (Elective Course 1st and 2nd year)
Achille Varzi, Claudio Calosi
Spring
ECTS 4
Formal Ontology and the Metaphysics of Physics. The seminar first provides an introduction to formal ontology and (alleged) formal notions such as parthood, extension, location, dependence and the like. It then goes on to explore different applications of said notions to central debates in the metaphysics of physics, such as physics-based answers to the special composition question, the physics of extended simples, relativistic supersubstantivalism, and quantum monism to mention a few.
Evaluation method: essay
Advanced Logic and Metaphysics (Elective Course 1st and 2nd year)
Timothy Williamson
Autumn
ECTS 4
The course will focus on the current logico-metaphysical debate between coarse-grained (intensionalist) and fine-grained (hyperintensionalist) frameworks. Roughly: intensionalists hold that necessarily co-extensive states of affairs, properties, and relations are always identical, while hyperintensionalists hold that they are sometimes distinct. We will discuss a range of apparent counterexamples to intensionalism, on issues concerning, for example, essential properties, metaphysical explanation and the Euthyphro Problem, ascriptions of intentional states such as knowledge and belief, provability in mathematics, and naturalism about moral properties, and the proper methodology for assessing them, including the relevance of heuristics in explaining our unreflective judgments. We will also consider contrasting theories of propositions as structured or unstructured, impossible worlds in semantics, the constraint of semantic compositionality, the Russell-Myhill paradox, and other issues.
Evaluation method: essay
Advanced Philosophy of Physics (Elective Course 1st and 2nd year)
Tim Maudlin
Spring
ECTS 4
Quantum Mechanics. What is called “quantum theory” is not actually a physical theory, i.e. a specification of a clear physical ontology and dynamics. This conceptual failure manifests itself in many ways, perhaps the most prominent of which is called the “measurement problem” (but which Philip Pearle has accurately called a “reality problem”). We will investigate the structure of quantum mechanics as it is usually presented and then look at several distinct physical theories that can recover—or nearly recover—the predictions made by using the quantum formalism in the usual way. We will pay particular attention to general results about physical reality, particularly Bell’s Theorem and the PBR theorem.
Evaluation method: essay
Metaphysics and Ancient Philosophy (Elective Course 1st and 2nd year)
Anna Marmodoro
Autumn
ECTS 6
Essentialism, as standardly defined in philosophy today, is the stance that things have essences or sets of essential properties. How to best characterize essential properties is controversial; by and large, they are assumed to be properties an object could not lack, because they are the properties that ‘make’ the object be what it is. Notwithstanding a significant variety of positions concerning essentialism today, it is fair to consider it a shared assumption that a thing is somehow related to its essence by having it (in all possible worlds). It is also a commonplace in today’s discussions of essentialism to identify Aristotle as the first to have introduced this position in the history of metaphysics. In this seminar we will probe these mainstream views. I will put forward the thesis, to be discussed in class (on the basis of primary and secondary resources), that essentialism as the ancients conceived it, is an altogether different theory from how essentialism is conceived today. The key difference is that for the ancients the essence is not something other than the thing itself, which ‘makes’ it be what it is, as modern essentialism has it. Rather, for the ancients, a thing is, in itself, its essence. I call the metaphysical position held by the ancients Parmenidean Essentialism (PE for brevity), because its roots lie in Parmenides’ thought. We will work with (selected) textual evidence in Parmenides’, Plato’s and Aristotle’s works to ascertain whether and why PE is a sound interpretation of their thought, to flesh out PE, and to bring out the difference between PE and contemporary essentialism (with special reference to Kit Fine’s work).
Evaluation method: essay
Logic and Ancient Philosophy (Elective Course 1st and 2nd year)
Paolo Crivelli
Spring
ECTS 4
Aristotle's Prior and Posterior analytics. Aristotle created logic and developed it to a level of great sophistication. There was nothing there before; and it took more than two millennia for something better to come around. The astonishment experienced by readers of the Prior Analytics, the most important of Aristotle's works that present the discipline, is comparable to that of an explorer discovering a cathedral in a desert. This course is designed to be of interest to both the students who took the one on Aristotle's Categories and De Interpretatione in Spring 2026 and those who did not.
Evaluation method: essay or presentation in class
Seminar in Medieval Philosophy (Elective Course 1st and 2nd year)
John Marenbon
Spring
ECTS 4
A philosophical introduction to the philosophy of the Long (200-1700) and Broad (Latin, Greek, Arabic, Hebrew) Western Middle Ages, by looking at selected texts on two topics: Universals; Determinism and Freedom of the Will. Among the authors studied will be Boethius, Al-Farabi, Anselm, Avicenna, Abelard, Duns Scotus, William of Ockham, Hasdai Crescas, Locke and Spinoza.
Evaluation method: essay
Seminar in Contemporary Philosophy (Elective Course 1st and 2nd year)
Peter Simons, Byron Simmons
Autumn
ECTS 6
Categories and Ways of Being. Categories, the highest genera of things, have long been a topic in metaphysics. Disputed in number, membership, and method of determination since antiquity, the topic of categories largely disappeared from philosophy for much of the twentieth century. More recently, the nature and the status of categories has again returned to discussion, and the old questions have reasserted themselves once more. Notable philosophers, including most prominently Aristotle and, in the twentieth century, Roman Ingarden, have claimed that each category corresponds to its own way or mode of being. The aim of this course is to trace crucial phases of the controversy over categories and ways of being, outline the proposed methods of determining them, and pursue an evaluation of the relative merits of various proposed schemes.
Preliminary and Background Reading
Aristotle – Categories
I. Kant – Critique of Pure Reason, “Table of Categories”
R. G. Collingwood – An Essay on Philosophical Method (Ch. 4–6)
P. F. Strawson – Individuals: An Essay in Descriptive Metaphysics
W. V. Quine – “On What There Is”
J. Anderson – Space, Time and the Categories
R. Ingarden – The Controversy over the Existence of the World (Vol. I)
R. Grossmann – The Categorial Structure of the World
R. M. Chisholm – A Realistic Theory of Categories
E. J. Lowe – The Four-Category Ontology
Evaluation method: essay
Seminar in Social Ontology (Elective Course 1st and 2nd year)
Kathrin Koslicki
Autumn
ECTS 4
Rules, Artworks, and Games. Social ontology is the philosophical study of the nature and characteristics of the social world. In this seminar, we will take a look at prominent topics and debates within social ontology. Among them, in Autumn 2026 we focus on rules, artworks and games.
Evaluation method: essay or presentation in class
Discrete Structures (Elective Course 1st and 2nd year)
Stefan Wolf
Spring
ECTS 6
The main topics of the course are propositional logic and proofs; sets, relations, and functions; combinatorics (urn models, inclusion-exclusion), graph theory (trees, planar graphs, Euler tours and Hamilton cycles) and some basic number theory (modular calculus, groups, Euler's theorem, RSA).
Information and Physics (Elective Course 1st and 2nd year)
Stefan Wolf
Spring
ECTS 3
This is a seminar focusing on various aspect at the intersection between information and its processing on one side, and physics, mainly quantum theory and thermodynamics, on the other. Being a seminar, the participants read a text and give a talk about it, on the basis of which they will be assessed. More information is available here.
Lugano Philosophy Colloquia (Elective Course 1st and 2nd year)
Niccolò Covoni, Paolo Gigli
Annual (half of the course in Autumn and half in Spring)
ECTS 4
The Lugano Philosophy Colloquia is a series of annual research talks in philosophy given at the Institute of Philosophy at USI. The talk series combines talks given by external guests and internal collaborators. MAP students are allowed to attend the talks and take them for credits by writing a 3’000 word reply to one of the talks. Hence, this course is a chance for MAP students to with cutting edge research talks and to actively participate in the current debate by writing a reply to such talks.
Evaluation method: essay
Summer School in Higher-Order Logic and Metaphysics (Elective for 1st and 2nd year)
Timothy Williamson, Peter Fritz
ECTS 4
