People at ISFI

Assistant Professor in Philosophy at USI and Deputy Director of the Institute of Philosophical Studies, Lugano. He works mainly in metaphysics, but his research interests extend to issues in the philosophy of religion, of physics and medieval philosophy. He received his PhD in Philosophy from the University of Geneva in 2014. He has been a Visiting Scholar at Columbia University and a Postdoctoral Fellow and Lecturer at USI, the Institute of Philosophical Studies, Lugano, the Universities of Neuchâtel, Geneva, and Fribourg.

Professor in Philosophy at USI. He occupied the chair of analytic philosophy in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Geneva from 1986 to 2016. He founded the European Society for Analytic Philosophy (ESAP) and thumos, and co-founded eidos – the Geneva-Lugano centre for metaphysics - and Inbegriff - the Geneva Seminar for Austro-German philosophy, and is a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Letters and of the Academia Europaea. He has taught philosophy in Aix, Barcelona, Constance, Dublin, Florence, Freiburg, Hamburg, Innsbruck, Irvine, Lausanne, Lucerne, Lugano, Paris, Pennsylvania, Rome, Santiago de Compostela, Sydney, Venice, Trento, Umea and Zurich. He has also supervised the PhD theses of 30 students, many of whom now hold positions in philosophy in several different countries. He has published extensively on analytic metaphysics, the philosophy of mind and Austrian thought from Bolzano to Musil, in particular on ascent, attitudes, certainty, colours, connectives, correctness, dependence, emotions, foolishness, grounds, indexicality, interest, irony, knowledge, meaning something, meanings, norms, properties, perception, poetry, processes, promises, reasons, relations, states of affairs, tropes, truth, truthmakers, wholes and value.

Joshua Babic earned his B.A. in Philosophy from the Institute of Philosophy of Lugano and his M.A. in Philosophy from the University of Geneva. He received his Ph.D. in Philosophy from the University of Geneva in 2023. His dissertation, titled Equivalence and Relationism, applies some of the formal tools developed in the literature on theoretical equivalence to the debate between substantivalists and relationists. He is currently a post-doc within the SNSF project Equivalence in Metaphysics. 

Researcher and lecturer at USI-FTL, Paolo’s interest lies in theoretical philosophy (primarily metaphysics), both in its historical development (primarily in Ancient Greece) and in the contemporary debate. He earned his PhD from the University of Geneva with a thesis on change in Plato’s Theaetetus, his MA from USI and his BA from the University of Bologna. During his PhD, he visited the University of Oxford. At USI, Paolo is also the coordinator of the Bachelor (BAF) and Master in Philosophy (MAP), and tutors students of the Institute of Philosophy (ISFI). He has taught Introduction to Philosophy and Ancient Philosophy (at BA level), Logic and Methodology of research in Philosophy (at BA and MA level).

Postdoctoral Researcher at the Institute of Philosophy (USI), working on the SNSF-funded 'Temporal Existence' project. Lorenzo completed his PhD in July 2024 at the University of Bristol, under the supervision of James Ladyman and Karim Thebault. During his PhD, he has been a visiting researcher at King’s College London and the University of Pittsburgh. He earned his MA in Philosophy from USI. Lorenzo’s main research areas are philosophy of physics, philosophy of science, and metaphysics. In particular, his research primarily focuses on inter-theory relations in science, foundational aspects of statistical physics, the ontology of quantum mechanics, and the metaphysical implications of general relativity. More information is available on his website: https://lorenzolorenzetti.net/.

I am a PhD student under Damiano Costa's SNSF project Temporal Existence. I have broad interests in metaphysics – ranging from the metaphysics of properties, to questions over the priority of parts over wholes, to the nature of social reality – and intersecting interests in the philosophy of mathematics, logic and the philosophy of science.
My current research is focused on the notion of an immanent property. The first key issue I am investigating concerns the different ways to understand what is it to be an immanent property, and the resources required to make the notion precise. The second key issue concerns the possible applications of this notion – both in the context of theories of properties and propositions, and in the context of the metaphysics of the material world – as well as its relation to other broadly Aristotelian ideas, such as potentiality, priority and essence.
Before joining Lugano as a PhD student, I was a MAP student.

Cristian Mariani is a Research Fellow at the Facoltà di Teologia di Lugano (USI), where is currently the PI of an SNSF Ambizione Grant entitled 'Quantum Indeterminacy. A Metaphysics for Spontaneous Collapse Models of Quantum Mechanics'. After the obtainment of his PhD from the Università Statale di Milano in January 2020, Cristian was a postdoc at the Institut Néel in Grenoble, the Universitat de Barcelona, and the Università Statale di Milano. His main research interests are in the philosophy of physics, the foundations of quantum mechanics, and the metaphysics of science.

Catrina Menghini earned her B.A. in Philosophy from the Institute of Philosophy of Lugano and her M.A. in Philosophy from the Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore (Milan). She is currently responsible for the Student Administration Office at the Institute of Philosophy of the Facoltà di Teologia di Lugano affiliated to the Università della Svizzera Italiana.

Léon Probst is a PhD student and assistant at Università della Svizzera italiana (USI). He received his MA in Philosophy at USI working on arbitrary objects. His interests range from the philosophy of logic and mathematics to mathematical and philosophical logic. His PhD thesis is on the arithmetization of metamathematics and its different sources of intensionality. More information on his website.

Andrea Salvador is a PhD candidate at the Institute of Philosophical Studies (USI-FTL, Lugano), where he is part of the "Equivalence in Metaphysics" SNF-funded project. His PhD thesis focuses on the logic of generalised identity and its applications to debates about grounding and theoretical equivalence, with Damiano Costa (Lugano) and Fabrice Correia (Geneva) as his thesis supervisors. He received his MA in Philosophy from USI in 2024, with a thesis on how generalised identities ground universal generalisations and provide them with generic truthmakers. He is interested mainly in metaphysics and philosophical logic, especially in modality, truthmaking, grounding, mereology, location, time and persistence.

Byron Simmons is currently a Postdoctoral Researcher at Università della Svizzera italiana (USI) working on the SNSF funded “Temporal Existence” project with Damiano Costa (PI). He earned a PhD in philosophy from Syracuse University, and previously worked as a Visiting Assistant Professor at Texas A&M University. He is interested in metaphysics, ethics, and the history of 19th and 20th century philosophy.

Amir is a PhD student and assistant at Università della Svizzera italiana (USI). After receiving degrees in psychology and psychotherapy, he received his MA in Philosophy at USI with a thesis on the reason-based explanations of intentional actions. His research interests are in the philosophy of mind and action, philosophy of language, and metaphysics. Currently, he is working on temporality in psychoanalysis.

Robert Michels earned his PhD in philosophy at the University of Geneva and after holding a Postdoc there and teaching in Geneva, at KIT in Karlsruhe, and at the University of Neuchâtel is now a scientific collaborator in Prof. Mulligan's project “Identity in Cognitive Science, Quantum Mechanics, and Metaphysics” at the Università della Svizzera italiana. He co-organizes the seminar of the eidos research group and works mostly on topics connected to modality and indeterminacy.

Paolo Natali studied Classics (BA) and Philosophy (MA) in Pisa. He earned his PhD in Philosophy at the University of Geneva with the dissertation ‘Doxa and Its Ontology. Appearances in Plato’s Early Dialogues’, written under the supervision of Prof. Paolo Crivelli. He has been a PostDoc in two SNSF projects: ‘Réalismes: Universaux, relations et états de choses dans les traditions austro-allemande et médiévale’ (Geneva, SNSF Project n. 182858, PI Laurent Cesalli) and ‘The Genealogy of Modes of Being’ (Lugano, SNSF Project n. 207948, PI Kevin Mulligan). His research focusses on issues in metaphysics, logic and philosophy of mind in Ancient philosophy (Plato and Aristotle), Austro-German philosophy (in particular Bernard Bolzano) and some contemporary debates (notably on existence, universals, and states of affairs). He has taught or teaches BA and MA courses at the Universities of Geneva, Lugano, Neuchâtel and (beginning September 2025) Fribourg.

Alain joined USI Lugano to pursue his research in value theory, metaphysics, and philosophy of mind. He leads the Lugano-based research project “Value Exploration”, which receives generous support from the Swiss National Science Foundation (SPF, Horizon Europe transitional measures for Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions). In Fall 2022, Alain conducted his research between USI Lugano, where he works with Prof. Kevin Mulligan, and Rutgers-New Brunswick, where he worked with Prof. Dean Zimmerman prior to joining USI Lugano. Previously, Alain was a postdoctoral researcher at Yale University, supervised by Prof. Laurie Paul. More information on Alain is available on his website.

Marta Pedroni is a PhD student at the University of Geneva and a PhD assistant at Università della Svizzera Italiana (USI). She obtained her MA in Philosophy at USI with a thesis on the emergence of spacetime in Loop Quantum Gravity. Her main interests lie at the intersection of Metaphysics and Philosophy of Physics. She is now working on the fate and role of spacetime singularities in quantum gravity.

Currently scientific collaborator in the SNF-funded project ‘Functions, Relations, and Types’, previously postdoc at the universities of Tübingen and Neuchâtel. M.Sc. in cognitive science (Osnabrück, 2005), PhD in philosophy (Washington University in St. Louis, 2012). He works mainly in metaphysics, with a special focus on properties, relations, and states of affairs.

Emma Tieffenbach is a scientific collaborator at Lugano working on the SNFS project “Essentialism and Mentalism in Austrian Economics”, with Kevin Mulligan (PI). In 2022-2023, she also teaches the ethics of gifting at the University of Geneva and the ethics of engineering at the EPFL. Previously, she held temporary lecturer positions at Lausanne, Fribourg and Neuchâtel. The philosophy of economics is her domain of expertise where she publishes on “invisible-hand explanations”, as well as on the nature of basic economic notions such as money, gift, economic exchanges and public goods.

Jonas works at the interface between metaphysics, the philosophy of physics, philosophy of mind, and philosophy of science. After obtaining a BA and MA in philosophy from the University of Fribourg and a BSc and MSc in Nuclear Physics from the University of Geneva (at CERN on NA61 experiment/T2K), he obtained a PhD in the philosophy of science at Bristol University in December 2017 under the joint supervision of James Ladyman and Richard Pettigrew. He is now a postdoc within the SNF-funded research project 'Identity in cognitive science, quantum mechanics, and metaphysics' at the Università della Svizzera italiana.