Professors

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.

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.

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).

Chair of Logic and Metaphysics at the University of St Andrews (UK), Arché Research Centre, and Research Chair at the Institute for Logic, Language and Computation (ILLC) at the University of Amsterdam (NL). He has also worked at the Institute for Advanced Study, University of Notre Dame (US), at the Sorbonne-Ecole Normale Superieure of Paris (FR), at and at the Universities of Aberdeen (UK), Venice, Padua, Milan-San Raffaele (IT). He works on logic and metaphysics and has published a number of papers and books on these subjects. He co-edits four entries of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

Claudio Calosi is a Professor of Philosophy at Ca’Foscari University, Venice, a Visiting Professor at USI, Lugano—MAP. Previously he was an assistant professor at Geneva, Department of Philosophy. He has been Visiting Faculty at Oxford, Leeds, Lisbon, UNAM (Mexico City), Trento and Perugia. He works mainly in Analytic Metaphysics, Philosophical Logic, and Philosophy of Physics. The results of his research have been published in journals such as Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Journal of Philosophical Logic, Philosophical Studies, Philosophical Quarterly, Analysis, Philosophy of Science, British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, Studies in History and Philosophy of Modern Physics, Foundations of Physics, to mention a few.

Chair of Analytic Philosophy at the University of Geneva. He is also co-director (with Kevin Mulligan) of eidos, the Center for Metaphysics, and a member of the Academia Europaea. He has published three books—Existential Dependence and Cognate Notions (2005), As Time Goes By: Eternal facts in an Ageing Universe (2012, with S. Rosenkranz) and Nothing To Come: A Defence of the Growing Block Theory of Time (2018, with S. Rosenkranz)—and over 70 articles. He has worked mainly in metaphysics and logic.

Emeritus Professor in ancient philosophy at the University of Geneva (Switzerland). He took his first degree at the University of Firenze (Italy) in 1988. Then, he took his doctorate at the Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa (Italy) in 1992. After a brief period of research at St John's College, Oxford, he became Lecturer (1992) and then Senior Lecturer (1998) at the Department of Philosophy of the University of Edinburgh. In 2002 he was elected Herbert Nicholas Fellow in Classical Philosophy at New College, Oxford, a position he held until he moved to Geneva in 2011.
Professor Crivelli’s main area of research is Philosophy of Language, Logic, and Ontology in classical antiquity (mainly Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoics). “I like to ask modern philosophical questions to ancient authors and work out their answers, or the answers they are committed to, on the basis of a scrupulous application of philological tools”.

I am full professor of logic, epistemology, philosophy of science and ontology at the Catholic University of Milan, where I take my PhD in 1999. My main interest is in the large domain of logics and metaphysics, in particular in developing modal logical and categorial tools for analyzing ontological and epistemological problems. My areas of specialization are epistemic and deontic logic, foundation of measurement, models in science, and the metaphysics of structured entities.

Professor of Theoretical Philosophy at the University of Neuchâtel. Koslicki is originally from Munich, Germany, and moved to the United States when she was twenty. She completed her B.A. in philosophy at SUNY Stony Brook in 1990 and her PhD at MIT in 1995.  Prior to moving to Switzerland in 2020, she was Professor and Tier 1 Canada Research Chair in Epistemology and Metaphysics at the University of Alberta, Canada, and held faculty and visiting positions in many parts of the United States. Koslicki’s research interests in philosophy lie mainly in metaphysics, the philosophy of language and ancient Greek philosophy, particularly Aristotle. In her first book, The Structure of Objects (Oxford University Press, 2008), Koslicki defends a neo-Aristotelian, structure-based theory of parts and wholes. In her second book, Form, Matter, Substance, (Oxford University Press, 2018), she continues and further develops her defense of the Aristotelian doctrine of hylomorphism, according to which those entities that fall under it are compounds of matter (hulē) and form (morphē or eidos).

Founder and CEO of Cognotekt, GmBH, an AI company based in Cologne specialised in the design and implementation of holistic AI solutions. He has 18 years of experience in the AI field, and 9 years as a management consultant and software architect. He has also worked as a physician and as a mathematician.

Professor of Philosophy, University of Glasgow. After studies at the Universities of Bern (Lic. Phil), Oxford (BPhil), and Princeton (PhD), he held postdoctoral positions at the Australian National University and the University of Leeds. His research is at the intersection of metaphysics and philosophical logic. Specifically, he has been interested in clarifying the commitments of physicalism using "that's it" or "totality" operators, as well as relations such as grounding and supervenience. Representative publications are "The Fundamental: Ungrounded or All-Grounding?" (Philosophical Studies, forthcoming), "Global Supervenience without Reductionism" (Journal of Philosophy, 2018), "The Contingency of Contingency" (Journal of
Philosophy, 2015), and "Total Logic" (Review of Symbolic Logic, 2014). He has won the Oxford Studies in Metaphysics Younger Scholar Prize, the Lauener Prize for Up-and Coming Philosophers. He was the Principal Investigator on the project "The Whole Truth" (AHRC, 2016-17), and a Co-Investigator on "Being without Foundations" (SNF, 2019-23).

Øystein Linnebo is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Oslo, having previously held positions at Bristol, London, and Oxford. His main research interests lie in the philosophies of logic and mathematics, metaphysics, and early analytic philosophy (especially Frege). He has published more than 60 scientific articles and is the author of three books, most recently Thin Objects: An Abstractionist Account (2018) and The Many and the One: A Philosophical Study of Plural Logic (with Salvatore Florio, 2021), both Oxford University Press.  

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/.

Fellow of the British Academy, Senior Research Fellow of Trinity College (Dublin, Ireland), and Honorary Professor of Medieval Philosophy at the University of Cambridge (UK). His interests cover the whole breadth of philosophy in the Long Middle Ages (c. 200 – c. 1700), in the Latin and Greek Christian, Islamic and Jewish traditions. He is one of the leaders of the project 'Immateriality, Thinking and the Self in the Philosophy of the Long Middle Ages', a joint project of the Faculty of Philosophy, University of Cambridge and the Department of Philosophy, Peking University, financed by the British Academy through an International Partnership and Mobility Grant, March 2015 – February 2016.

Anna Marmodoro has been Leonard and Elizabeth Eslick Professor of Philosophy at Saint Louis University (US) since 2024. She is concomitantly an Honorary Professor of Philosophy at Durham University (UK). She previously held the Chair of Metaphysics in the Philosophy Department of Durham University (2016-2024), after having spent a decade at the University of Oxford, affiliated with Corpus Christi College (2007-2017). At the Universities of Oxford and later Durham, Marmodoro directed a large-scale multidisciplinary research group with successively staged funding from the European Research Council, the Templeton World Charity Foundation, the Leverhulme Trust, and the Art and Humanities Research Council. Marmodoro has held visiting positions internationally, in Europe, the U.S., Mexico, and Australia. She is the co-founder and co-editor of the journal Ancient Philosophy Today: Dialogoi for Edinburgh University Press. Her research interests are primarily in ancient, late antiquity and medieval philosophy, and contemporary analytic metaphysics.

Tim Maudlin is Professor of Philosophy at NYU and Founder and Director of the John Bell Institute for the Foundations of Physics. Before joining NYU he was at Rutgers for a quarter-century. He has a BA in Physics and Philosophy from Yale and a PhD in History and Philosophy of Science from Pittsburgh. His research interests lie primarily in the foundations of physics, metaphysics, and logic. His books include Quantum Non-Locality and Relativity (Blackwell), Truth and Paradox (Oxford), The Metaphysics Within Physics (Oxford), Philosophy of Physics: Space and Time (Princeton University Press), New Foundations for Physical Geometry: The Theory of Linear Structures (Oxford). Philosophy of Physics: Quantum Theory (Princeton). He is a member of the Academie Internationale de Philosophie des Sciences and the Foundational Questions Institute (FQXi) and has been a Guggenheim Fellow and an ACLS fellow.

Bence Nanay is BOF Research Professor of Philosophy at the Centre for Philosophical Psychology at the University of Antwerp. He has published more than 130 peer-reviewed articles on the philosophy of mind and cognitive science and three monographs with Oxford University Press, with three more under contract. His work is supported by a large number of high-profile grants, including a two-million-Euro grant from the ERC.  

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.

Professor of Theoretical Philosophy at the University of Tuebingen (Germany) since 2012. He was an undergraduate student at Tuebingen and at Stanford University, and a graduate student at Oxford University, where he received his B.Phil. in 1999 and his D.Phil. in 2001. From 2002 to 2005, he was a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow and a Junior Research Fellow at Brasenose College, Oxford. Subsequently, he held tenure-track positions as Assistant Professor at Tulane University and at Washington University in St. Louis. In addition, he held a Research Fellowship from the Humboldt-Foundation and was a visiting professor at UCLA.

Full professor of philosophy at the Trinity College Dublin (Ireland). He studied at the University of Manchester, and has held teaching posts at the University of Bolton, the University of Salzburg, where he is Honorary Professor of Philosophy, and the University of Leeds. He has been President of the European Society for Analytic Philosophy and is current director of the Franz Brentano Foundation. 
His research interests include metaphysics and ontology, the history of logic, the history of Central European Philosophy, particularly in Austria and Poland in the 19th and 20th centuries, and the application of metaphysics to engineering and other non-philosophical disciplines. He is the author of two books and over 200 articles. He is currently working on a project supported by the British Academy to chart the metaphysics of quantity.

Barry Smith is Professor of Philosophy in the University at Buffalo, with joint appointments in the Departments of Biomedical Informatics and Computer Science and Engineering. Smith is the author of some 500 peer-reviewed publications on ontology and related topics. His work in ontology led to the establishment of Basic Formal Ontology (BFO), which as the most commonly adopted upper-level ontology development framework, recently approved to become international standard ISO/IEC:21838-2. This work led also to the formation of the OBO (Open Biomedical Ontologies) Foundry, a suite of interoperable ontology modules designed to support information-driven research in biology and biomedicine. The methodology underlying BFO and the OBO Foundry is currently being applied in a range of different domains, including military intelligence and industrial engineering. Smith’s research has been funded by the National Institutes of Health, the US, Swiss and Austrian National Science Foundations, the Volkswagen Foundation, the Humboldt Foundation, the European Union, and the US Department of Defense. In 2023 he published with Jobst Landgrege Why Machines Will Never Rule the World, a study of the limits of AI. A revised and expanded edition of this book is in preparation.

Professor of Philosophy at Columbia University, New York (USA). After graduating from the University of Trento (Italy), he received his PhD in philosophy from the University of Toronto (Canada). His main research interests are in logic and metaphysics. He is an editor of The Journal of Philosophy, a subject editor of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, and an associate or advisory editor of The Monist, Synthese, Dialectica, The Review of Symbolic Logic, and other journals. He also writes for the general public and contributes regularly to some Italian newspapers, and is currently teaching for the Prison Education Program sponsored by Columbia University’s Justice-in-Education Initiative.

Permanent senior researcher of the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC), at the Institute for the Structure of Matter (IEM) in Madrid. Her research explores the quantum properties of space and time, touching on diverse topics ranging from cosmology to quantum information. She was trained in theoretical physics at the Universities of Padua and Pavia, and continued her research on quantum gravity heading postdoctoral positions in France, the Netherlands, and Spain. Between 2019 and 2025, she was awarded a Canada Research Chair in the Foundations of Physics, and concurrently was Associate Professor with a joint appointment in the Department of Physics and Astronomy and in the Department of Philosophy at Western University, Canada, where she also held the role of Associate Director of the Rotman Institute of philosophy. She is committed to the promotion of underrepresented groups in science, to a poetic yet rigorous communication of science, and to science as a tool for peace and democracy.

Timothy Williamson has been the Wykeham Professor of Logic at Oxford University since 2000. Since 2018 he has also been Whitney Griswold Visiting Professor at Yale University. His main research interests are in philosophical logic, epistemology, metaphysics, philosophy of language, and metaphilosophy. He is the author of Identity and Discrimination (1990, updated 2013), Vagueness (1994), Knowledge and its Limits (2000), The Philosophy of Philosophy (2007, updated 2021), Modal Logic as Metaphysics (2013), Tetralogue (2015), Doing Philosophy (2018), Suppose and Tell: The Semantics and Heuristics of Conditionals (2020), and (with Paul Boghossian) Debating the A Priori (2020), and  over two hundred academic articles. Williamson on Knowledge (2009), and Williamson on Modality (2017), contain critical essays on his work with his replies. He has been the supervisor or co-supervisor of about 50 successful doctoral theses at Oxford and elsewhere. Of British nationality, Professor Williamson was born in Uppsala, Sweden, in 1955. After an undergraduate degree in mathematics and philosophy and a doctorate in philosophy, both at Oxford, he was a lecturer in philosophy at Trinity College Dublin, a fellow and tutor at University College Oxford, and Professor of Logic and Metaphysics at the University of Edinburgh. He has been a visiting professor at MIT, Princeton, and the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, a visiting fellow at the Australian National University and the University of Canterbury (New Zealand), a visiting scholar at the Centre for Advanced Study in Oslo, and Tang Chun-I visiting professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Professor Williamson has been President of the Aristotelian Society and the Mind Association. He is a fellow of the British Academy and of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, a member of the Academia Europaea and of the Institut International de Philosophie, a foreign member of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters, a foreign honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and an honorary member of the Royal Irish Academy. He holds honorary doctorates from the universities of Belgrade and Bucharest.

Associate professor for Informatics at USI since 2011. Born in Schaffhausen, Switzerland, he received a Dipl. Math. ETH, followed by a PhD in Computer Science from ETH Zurich under the supervision of Professor Ueli Maurer. After a postdoc at McGill University, Montreal, he was Assistant Professor at the University of Waterloo, Ontario, and Université de Montréal, Quebec. From 2005 to 2011, he was an SNF Professor for Quantum Information at ETH Zürich.
His research domain lies in the fields of cryptography, information theory, and quantum information processing. In particular, he is interested in an efficient realization of provably secure cryptographic and other information-processing functionalities based on weak classical or quantum-physical primitives.

Full Professor of Philosophy at the University of Genève (Switzerland). He works primarily in philosophy of physics, philosophy of science, and metaphysics.
He has studied at the Universities of Bern, Cambridge, and Pittsburgh, where he received his PhD. He is the recipient of the 2009 Philosophy of Science Association Recent PhD Essay Award and the 2012 Lauener Prize for Up-and-Coming Philosophers and was a Fellow of the American Council of Learned Societies. He was Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, San Diego. Currently, he collaborates with Nick Huggett (University of Illinois at Chicago) on a large Templeton-funded project in the philosophy of quantum gravity.