The nexus between truth and agency, as adjacent concepts like authenticity, identity, and subjectivity, have been at the center of my research from the start. I have worked on these topics from the two sides of literary scholarship and philosophical investigation. My theoretical background spans from poststructuralist philosophy and literary theory to post-quinean philosophy of language and topics in conceptual engineering.
I have written a monograph on the concept of truth, political identity, and the claim for authenticity in Andreas Maier’s novels, edited a volume on the Italian philosopher Carlo Michelstaedter, and published widely on various aspects regarding the potential political impact of literature, covering topics in Romanticism, Modernism, and (Post-)Postmodernism. Over the last years, I concentrated on philosophy of language, especially on semantic realism and conceptual agency in Rorty, Davidson, and Quine, and on topics in conceptual engineering, especially on the role pragmatism can play to assess and develop questions of semantic plasticity. My further works and research projects focused on various degrees of intersection of determinism and freedom, ethics and aesthetics and the role concepts play in literary and empirical investigations (e.g. "parody" in F. Schlegel and "uncertainty" in Heisenberg).
Current research project: PRIN 2022 MUR (2023-2025), Co-investigator, sub-unit: philosophy of language
DeCo - Democratizing Concepts
Concepts play a central role in our coping with the environment, in our social interactions, and in how we interpret social changes and their moral stakes. Scholars in the fields of philosophy of language, moral philosophy, social philosophy, psychology, and cognitive science agree on the social and ethical relevance of concepts. Two aspects, however, are controversial both at the descriptive level and at the normative level: conceptual revision—that is, the ways through which concepts are contested and renegotiated—and politicization—that is, the processes through which concepts become politically relevant.
The main goal of DeCo is to provide an integrated approach to the understanding of mechanisms underlying the politicization, negotiation, and democratization of specific concepts (e.g., ecological, gender/sex, and scientific-technological concepts). To pursue this end, DeCo will engage both in theoretical analysis and in empirical study, and in doing so it will benefit from the expertise of members from varying but complementary backgrounds. By retrieving contributions from philosophy of language, moral, social and political philosophy, psychology, and cognitive science, DeCo aims to illuminate some key aspects of the practices through which social actors contest, negotiate, and reconstruct concepts in specific situations. In doing so, DeCo will investigate decisive issues such as hybrid concepts (i.e., concepts at the interface of the abstract~concrete continuum, at the bridge between biology and culture, such as ecological and gender/sex concepts). Building on previous studies on the relationship between abstract concepts and social interaction, DeCo will address how hybrid concepts are represented and used through innovative interactive experiments. It will also investigate when and with which concepts people perceive the need to rely on others, deepening the mechanisms through which knowledge is deferred to others (knowledge outsourcing) and/or negotiated with others. In this way, DeCo will provide a new lens and new methodological instruments to address the variability of conceptual representations both on a theoretical and empirical level.
https://filo.unibo.it/it/ricerca/progetti-di-ricerca/democratizing-concepts-deco
Currently concluded research project: Horizon2020-MSCA-IF-2018 RELEVANT REALISM
Relevant Realism - Truth, Power, and Action for 21st Century Societies
The aim of this project is to develop a fully functional new concept of realism which intrinsically combines theories of truth with theories of action. This new theory will be measured against other contemporary approaches and adapted to current political problems to validate it and to investigate its practical applications. The problems underpinning the urgent need of developing a new concept of realism are, namely, the rise of authoritarianism and the apparent ineffectiveness of current truth-concepts and communicative strategies in countering totalitarian, authoritarian, and simplistic-populist discourses. The innovative, nostalgia-free concept of realism titled “relevant realism” will provide new ways to frame current political problems and new tools for political communication while avoiding both the current realist backlash and the postmodern relativist trap. The project will engage in a detailed analytic assessment of concepts of realism and a comparative analysis and fusion of positions in Neopragmatism, Poststructuralism, and adjacent theories. Providing a realist approach without losing sight of postmodern and poststructuralist contributions to disentangle and unveil the power-mechanisms involved in every truth-claim is of utmost interest for a culturally diversified space like Europe where constant complexifications of cultures and ways of living have to be faced and are to be preserved as a value. The project will be carried out at the University of Bologna and at the University of Oslo during a secondment period.
connected events:
Workshop: Truth versus the Rhetoric of Truth: Authority, Realism, and Power (June 27-29, 2019, https://www.hf.uio.no/ifikk/english/research/news-and-events/events/conferences/2019/truth-versus-the-rhetoric-of-truth-authority-reali.html)
Workshop: Conceptual Engineering and Pragmatism (July 8-9, 2021, https://conceptualengineeringpragmatism.yolasite.com/)
Roundtable: Dov'è finito il discorso sulle fake-news? (July 13, 2021, https://magazine.unibo.it/calendario/2021/07/04/dove-finito-il-discorso-sulle-fake-news?d=2021-07-04)
Outreach: MSCA-Event: Science is wonderful! Meet the scientist! (November 22-26, 2021, https://www.scienceiswonderful.eu/en)
