People

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), at Corpus Christi College, University of Oxford (2019), at the Catholic University of Milan (2025), and at UNAM, Mexico City (2025).

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 his career, he has given more than 70 talks, 15 public lectures, organised 30 workshops or congresses and 15 public lecture series.

In 2025/26 he is guest professor at UNAM and at Princeton University.

Personal details

Postdoctoral Researcher at 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 relativity theory.

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.

Andrea Lupo is a PhD student under Damiano Costa's SNSF project Temporal Existence. He has 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. His current research is focused on the notion of an immanent property. The first key issue he is 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, he was a MAP student.