Director
Federico L.G. Faroldi
Prof. Faroldi is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Pavia, director of CERNAI and of the Normative Risk Lab. He is also an affiliate faculty at the Center for Human-Compatible AI, UC Berkeley.
His research and teaching interests span logic (especially deontic logic), AI (especially formal theories of alignment), and philosophy of law and normativity (practical reasons, responsibility).
Senior Fellows
Matías Osta-Vélez
Matías Osta-Vélez is an Associate Professor in Philosophy of Science at the University of the Republic, Uruguay. His research focuses on the foundations of cognitive science, particularly theories of concepts and reasoning.
He completed his PhD at the Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy (LMU) and the Institut d’Histoire et de Philosophie des Sciences et des Techniques (Paris 1). He later held a NeuroMindFellowship at Ruhr-Universität Bochum and a postdoctoral position at Heinrich-Heine UniversitätDüsseldorf. He is the author, jointly with Peter Gärdenfors, of Reasoning with Concepts: Conceptual Spaces as a Framework (MIT Press, 2026).
Fellows
Federico Cella
My research focuses on the interplay between language and cognition, with particular attention to how language can affect our beliefs, perception, and behavior toward social categories.
Miguel Garcia-Godinez
My research covers key topics within legal theory, social ontology, and normative reasoning. I’m currently working on a theory of institutional responsibility for AI governance.
Personal Website: https://miguelgarciagodinez.wixsite.com/home
Giorgio Lenta
My research focus is at the crossroads of formal semantics, philosophy of language, and metaphysics; with a special interest in hyperintensionality, synonymy, propositional paradoxes, counterfactuals and counterpossibles in scientific contexts, Impossible Worlds Semantics and Truthmaker Semantics.
Virginia Presi
Virginia holds a Ph.D. in Philosophy of Law with the Doctor Europaeus distinction, awarded by the Faculty of Law at the University of Milan (Italy, 2025). Before that, she obtained an MA in Metaphysics (Philosophical Sciences, University of Milan, 2021) and a BA in Informal Logic (Philosophy, University of Trento, 2019). She works in legal theory and the philosophy of normativity. Her specific interests concern the normative force of social customs in law and social ontology, with particular attention to the nature of normative attitudes and the ontology of social norms. She is also interested in deontic logic and normative reasoning, in particular in the role played by social normativity in the making of generic notions.
She is the founder of the international network PhiLawSon – Philosophy of Law and Social Ontology.
Further information: Orcid: 0009-0007-9172-0685 , Website: https://www.virginiapresi.it/ Academia
Niccolò Rossi
Niccolò Rossi completed a PhD in Cognitive Science and Language at the University of Barcelona, where he was a member of LOGOS and of the Barcelona Institute of Analytic Philosophy. His dissertation—co-supervised at the Institute for Logic, Language and Computation of the University of Amsterdam—explored topics at the intersection of logic and epistemology, with a particular focus on the problem of logical omniscience and the hyperintensionality of epistemic notions.