Emanuele Costa
Hello, and welcome to my website!
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I am a Sicilian world traveler, and I currently work as Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Vanderbilt University, in Nashville, Tennessee.​
I received my Ph.D. from Birkbeck College, University of London.
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I specialize in Early Modern Philosophy and Metaphysics. Together with a few colleagues, I have founded the VAMP (Vanderbilt Modern Philosophy) group to explore the boundaries of our discipline.
Apart from this website, you can learn more about my research on these platforms:
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Academia profile:
https://vanderbilt.academia.edu/EmanueleCosta
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PhilPeople profile:
philpeople.org/profiles/emanuele-costa
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Research Interests
What I do (and why).
Check out my "Research Blog"
through the tab at the top of this homepage to learn more about my current projects.
My research began with Early Modern Philosophy, and now lies at the intersection between Metaphysics, the History of Philosophy, and the Philosophy of Religion.
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I am particularly interested in the philosopher Benedict/Baruch/Bento de Spinoza, his historical antecedents, and his bold metaphysical views.
Furthermore, I am fascinated by wild metaphysical questions, such as:
​- What is the nature of eternity?
- What does it mean to individuate a singular being?
- What is the metaphysical role of relations?
- Is the structure of reality meaningful or meaningless?
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I love investigating how the concepts and ideas developed in a different era shape the ways we understand our current world.
I am currently completing a manuscript on Baruch Spinoza’s concept of individuality and relationality, and I have an active research project on Anne Conway’s philosophy of transcendence.
"Spinoza and Scholastic Philosophy" - Blackwell Companion to Spinoza (2021).
“Spiritual Automata and Bodies Without Organs: Spinoza, Deleuze, and Parallelism” (2022).
“Whole-Parts Relations in Early Modern Philosophy" - Encyclopedia of Early Modern Philosophy and the Sciences (2021).
“Leibniz on Relations: From (Soft) Reductionism to the Expression of the Universe” (2016).
“A Systemic Spinoza: a Gateway to a Systemic Interpretation of Spinoza’s Thought” (2014).