Critical Social Philosophy is a permanent workshop of philosophical studies aiming at promoting a closer dialectic among researchers in different fields of philosophical and scientific research on the most important problems of contemporary debate, and between research and teaching in every academic and school level.

The workshop, established by Francesca Di Lorenzo Ajello and her research group, is active on the main fields of philosophical research (History of Philosophy, Epistemology, Philosophy of Mind, Action Theory, Social Ontology), and has adopted in each one of these fields an antisolipsistic and holistic theoretical approach that dialogues with scientific achievements in general, and with  cognitive science and neuroscience in particular.

 
Moving along the lines of Di Lorenzo’s studies on Adorno's critical theory of knowledge, style of thinking and society, we came to reconstruct the conceptual and inferential, and therefore social nature of perception and knowledge in the context of the liberalized naturalism of the School of Pittsburgh (Sellars, McDowell, Brandom).

We have rooted these theoretical achievements in John Searle's non reductive philosophy of mind and in his speech act theory, enlightening the intersubjective nature of intentionality and consciousness on one side and the deontic implications of the speech act theory on the other, connecting these researches with the new field of Social ontology, that we see, at least in part, as a development of Hegel's thought.

In our effort to overcome the traditional divide between continental and analytic perspectives and among the various dichotomies of Western thought, we have worked on a variety of authors and traditions (Plato, Aristotle, Locke, Spinoza, Nietzsche and Quine among the others) aiming at reconstructing the genealogy of our naturalistic and non reductive philosophical perspective while showing the subtle interplay between different philosophical positions and fields.

We think that social ontology is the contemporary area of philosophical studies that better than others realizes this interplay among disciplines, themes and theoretical approaches, and in this perspective the group is part of the ENSO (European Network on Social ontology).

The workshop is aimed at giving its specific contribution to this wide area of philosophical studies through organization of international conferences; participation to European projects, and organization of biweekly seminars and discussions of research papers.