Dr. Damiano Costa

Biography

Damiano Costa is an assistant professor and deputy director of the Institute of Philosophical Studies at the Università della Svizzera italiana, Lugano since 2018. He completed his doctorate at the University of Geneva in 2014, subsequently teaching at the University of Fribourg (2014-2017), the University of Geneva (2015-2017), Corpus Christi College, University of Oxford (2019), Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore (2025), and UNAM in Mexico City (2025). He was a Visiting Scholar at Columbia University (2013-2014) and an Academic Visitor at the University of Oxford (2019-2020). Currently, he oversees the Bachelor's program in Philosophy (BAF), as well as the Master's program (MAP) and the Doctorate in Philosophy (PhDPhil.) established in 2017 and 2022 respectively. Costa has served on the editorial board of the international journal Dialectica and is a member of the research commission of FTL. He is also part of eidos, the Metaphysics Research Center at the University of Geneva. In 2022, he received the SNSF Starting Grant from the Swiss National Science Foundation. He leads three research projects, including two funded by the SNSF. His main contributions are in metaphysics, the philosophy of science, and medieval philosophy, focusing on themes such as time, change, persistence, universals, the philosophical consequences of relativity theory, mereology, hylomorphism, and localization theory. He has published a monograph and various articles in prestigious philosophical journals including Synthese, Philosophical Quarterly, and Philosophical Studies. He will be a visiting professor at UNAM and Princeton University in 2025/26.

Research Interests