I am an Italian philosopher and sociologist specializing in the methodological foundations of the social sciences. I am based in Como, Lombardy. Since December 2025, I have been an Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Insubria, appointed through the Italian government’s Rientro dei Cervelli program (a “brain gain” initiative aimed at attracting academics working abroad back to Italy). In parallel, I am an Affiliate Professor in the Department of Philosophy at Nankai University (China). My research interests focus on the individualism-holism debate, complex systems, ordinary rationality, and the logic of causal explanation. I approach these topics drawing on various intellectual traditions, including fallibilism, phenomenological hermeneutics, analytical sociology, and the Austrian school of economics.
After graduating in Political Science from Luiss University (Italy), I earned my PhD in Philosophy from the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences) and the Center for Research in Applied Epistemology (CREA) at the École Polytechnique (France). I subsequently undertook postdoctoral positions at at Duke University (USA) and Sorbonne University (France), the latter as an FMSH Fernand Braudel fellow. I then held teaching appointments at ESCP Europe Business School Paris (France) and Luiss University (Italy). From 2015 to 2025, I lived in China, where I worked as an associate professor, first at Southeast University and later at Nankai University.
I have served as an editorial board member for the SAGE journal Philosophy of the Social Sciences since 2018. In addition, I am a co-founder and member of the steering committee of the Asian Network for the Philosophy of the Social Sciences (ANPOSS). In 2017, I was awarded the Tianjin Young Scholars Program Prize, a Chinese award recognizing scientific merit.
If you would like to read my publications, please feel free to contact me.
Francesco Di Iorio 