PhD in Philosophy

Research in this area is devoted to analyzing the normative presuppositions of social and political practices in a mainly interdisciplinary perspective. The goal is to contribute not only to the theoretical discussion in ethics and political philosophy, but also to provide guidelines for specific moral and political practices, with special reference to the areas of healthcare, communication, justice, citizenship and public ethics.

Research projects devoted to the following areas will be taken in special consideration:

• theoretical discussion on the nature of moral judgments; the relationship between ethics and epistemology; the relationship between moral philosophy and moral psychology; bioethical issues, including environmental ethics and animal ethics; the moral implications of neuroscience e the issue of enhancement; communication and media ethics
• theories of justice, legitimacy and compliance; the rights and duties of migrants; toleration and multiculturalism; theories of just war
• social criticism and utopian thinking; the notions of ideology, emancipation and solidarity.

Two are the main directions of research pursued in the history of ideas area: general issues in the methodology of history of ideas, culture and philosophy, and individual historical topics.

• Methodological research will revolve around the relation between history of ideas, the philosophical canon and human and social sciences. Germane to this subfield will be an interdisciplinary research focused on the archeology of knowledge as a method for the history of ideas, on the relationship between critical thinking and ideology, on skepticism, on the relationships between history and philosophy, myth and rationality, metaphor and conceptual thinking, as well as on the history of the philosopher as a conceptual character and on the notion of experience in the history of thought.
• The second direction of research will encompass specific historical and conceptual problems. The study of Antiquity and the Middle Ages will focus on subjects such as the care of the self, the metaphysics of Platonism and its historical legacy, the fusion of horizons between Greek philosophy and the Biblical message and the apocalyptic tradition, with special regards to Gioacchino da Fiore. The study of Modern and Contemporary thought will dwell in particular upon Humanism and Renaissance, the role of Cartesianism in the formation of Early Modern Philosophy, the problem of theodicy, the relation between subjectivity and truth, pragmatism and neo-pragmatism in American thinking, and post-structuralism and postmodernism as philosophical, aesthetic, and cultural categories.

Research in this area concerns science and its impact on society, language and communication, philosophy of mind and perception, logic and its applications, along the following lines of research:

• Experimental and social epistemology, and philosophy of science: neurological basis of human rationality; behavioral economics; neuroeconomics; cognitive science of judgement, choice, and decision; experimental economics and evidence-based public policy; the role of experts in science and science communication; scientific disagreement.

• Philosophy of language (theoretical and experimental): ordinary language and its manipulative and propagandistic use; communication and disinformation in science and policy; hate speech; theory of meaning and its expressive and evaluative dimension; feminist philosophy of language.

• Philosophy of mind and perception: intentionality and consciousness; mental content, language, and thought; cognitive phenomenology; metaphysical, epistemological, semantic, and empirical issues concerning perception.

• Logic and philosophy of mathematics: the application of formal tools, whether classical or non-classical, to the foundations of mathematics and to set-theoretic paradoxes, and connected logico-philosophical issues; the ontological status of mathematical entities; the notion of reference in formal vs natural languages.

In the area of Theoretical Philosophy and Aesthetics the following topics are of particular interest:

• Classical ontology and fundamental metaphysical concepts, the problems presented by contemporary nihilism, the metaphysical question about the world and human being in light of the current advancement of the sciences, and the questions of post-modernity;
• The phenomenology of experience, existence and psychiatry; the phenomenology of the person, emotions, intersubjectivity and empathy; the phenomenology of gender differences and gender personal identity; phenomenologically-inspired qualitative social ontology and analytic social ontology;
• Classical reflection around art and the forms of making, from the Middle Ages to the twentieth century, the aesthetics of the sacred, the philosophy of the sublime, the philosophy of the novel and fashion.