Filippo Scafi is a Lecturer in Philosophy and Anthropology at GCAS. He teaches in the BA programme and is the principal mentor in the MA Philosophy programme. He is an affiliated researcher at the School of Materialist Research.
His work is concerned with philosophy itself: what it is, what it can do, and how it should be understood. He treats these as historical questions as much as conceptual ones, and therefore pursues them through the history of philosophy. His research centres on epistemology in a broad sense — the conditions under which knowledge secures itself, the limits it meets in doing so, and the persistence of those limits from ancient scepticism to contemporary theory.
He works extensively on François Laruelle’s non-philosophy, both as an attempt to think philosophy from outside its own decision and as a project he reads critically. Ancient thought is for him a live source, inspired by the Italian scholar Giorgio Colli: Greek scepticism, the passage from orality to writing, the enigma and its precipitation into dialectic, the relation between myth and philosophy. Anthropology and psychoanalysis enter as disciplines that press on philosophy from outside — the first through its encounter with alterity and the question of whether other worlds are genuinely other, the second through its account of what a subject cannot know and what returns from that inability.
He is available to supervise dissertations in ancient philosophy (particularly scepticism and the formation of philosophical discourse), contemporary French thought (Laruelle, Derrida, Castoriadis, Deleuze), epistemology and the theory of knowledge, psychoanalytic theory, and the philosophical stakes of anthropology.
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Research Interests & Specializations
MetaphilosophyEpistemologyNon-philosophy (Laruelle)Ancient Greek thoughtPsychoanalytic theoryPhilosophical anthropologyAI and epistemology
