Damiano Costa

Damiano Costa is Assistant Professor and Deputy Director of the Institute of Philosophy at USI-FTL (2018-).

After his PhD at the University of Geneva (2014), he taught in Fribourg (2014-17), Geneva (2015-17) and at Corpus Christi College, University of Oxford (2019). 

He was Visiting Scholar at Columbia University (2013-14) and Academic Visitor at the University of Oxford (2019-20).

He currently directs the Bachelor of Arts in Philosophy (BAF). He also directs the Master in Philosophy (MAP) and PhD Philosophy (PhDPhil.) programmes that he contributed to create in 2017 and 2022, respectively.

He was a member of the editorial committee of the international journal Dialectica. He is a member of the Research Commission of the FTL. He is a member of eidos - the Centre for Research in Metaphysics at the University of Geneva.

In 2022, he was awarded an SNSF Starting Grant from the Swiss National Science Foundation. At USI-FTL, he currently leads three research projects, including two funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation.

In 2024, he is organiser of the annual congress of the International Association for the Philosophy of Time. In his career, he has given more than 70 talks, 15 public lectures, organised 30 workshops or congresses and 15 public lecture series.

His main contributions concern metaphysics, the philosophy of science and medieval philosophy, and in particular the topics of time, change and persistence, universals, the philosophical consequences of the theory of relativity, mereology, hylomorphism and location theory.

On these topics, he has published a book and several articles in leading international philosophical journals such as Synthese, The Philosophical Quarterly and the British Journal for the History of Philosophy. He was the first Swiss-based scholar to publish an article in The Journal of Philosophy.

He currently leads three research projects.

The SNSF Starting Grant 'Temporal Existence', funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation (2023-28), which includes one doctoral and two post-doctoral positions. The project covers various topics, from the philosophical consequences of relativity to the spatiotemporal profile of universals.

The 'REP22-25' project, financed by a private foundation and aimed at enhancing philosophical research at USI-FTL, employs three senior researchers. 

The 'Equivalence in Metaphysics' project, funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation (2024-27) and directed together with Claudio Calosi (Geneva), which includes two post-doc positions. The project aims to systematise the various notions of equivalence between theories in the field of philosophy and beyond.