Achille Varzi - Biography#

Achille Varzi graduated summa cum laude in Philosophy from the University of Trento (Italy) in 1982. He worked for a while as a researcher in Artificial Intelligence in Trento (1989-1995). He received his PhD in 1994 from the University of Toronto (advisor: Hans G. Herzberger), writing a dissertation on Universal Semantics (later published as a book, Kluwer 1999). In 1995 he was hired by Columbia University as an Assistant Professor. He received tenure in 2003 and became Full Professor of Philosophy in 2006. He was Director of Undergraduate Studies (2004-2006), then Director of Graduate Studies (2006-2009) and chair of the Department of Philosophy (2009 to 2012). Since 2001, he has been an editor of The Journal of Philosophy. His research is mostly in analytic metaphysics, logic and the philosophy of logic. He is a leading authority in mereology (the study of the part-whole relations), on which he published many articles, edited books and journal issues, and is now publishing a book (Mereology, with A.J.Cotnoir) with Oxford University Press. In the last 20 years, his teaching activity has been intense, both in the US and in Europe. In addition, he has been very active as a public intellectual, contributing to newspapers and magazines and participating in a philosophical program on the culture channel of Italian national TV (40 episodes). He specializes in writing very short stories with a philosophical point; he published two books of such stories (co-authored with R.Casati), one of which has been translated into nine languages, including Korean and Chinese. He also co-authored with C.Calosi a philosophical poem (imitating Dante's Divine Comedy) where sinners in Hell represent metaphysical positions.