Costanza
Penna

About

I am currently a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for Subjectivity Research at the University of Copenhagen.

My work sits at the intersection of social ontology and phenomenology, with a focus on transgenerationality.

Before moving north, I received my PhD in philosophy from the IUSS School for Advanced Studies in Pavia and the University of Turin in May 2026, after completing both my BA and MA at the University of Turin.
Since 2022, I have been a member of LabOnt – Center for Ontology.

My doctoral dissertation, Groups and Generations, develops a phenomenological account of transgenerational groups, explaining how some groups unfold as diachronic subjects beyond one's lifetime and how transgenerational normativity is shared across generations.

Research

I began my research in moral philosophy, studying the work of the French-naturalized thinker Emmanuel Levinas while moving between Turin and Paris. I was then introduced to social ontology and developed a profound interest in the “what is” of our living together. I spent the spring quarter of 2022 on the sunny coast of Orange County, where I studied with Margaret Gilbert, whose work I was then exploring in my Master's thesis. My time there crucially convinced me that I wanted to pursue a life in research.

Since then, I have been thinking mostly about social groups and how “we” come to take shape and stand the test of time, even across many generations. My research focuses on puzzles of transgenerational group formation and persistence; collective memory, shared transmission, and processes of collective renegotiation; collective agency and transgenerational social action; normative bonds; group identity and ethos; and transgenerational responsibility. I approach these questions through a phenomenological lens, drawing on Husserl, Stein, Steinbock, Schütz, and others. Somehow, I also seem always to find my way back to Levinas. More broadly, I am interested in the foundations of social ontology as a contemporary field in analytic philosophy, its methodology, and its relationship to phenomenology. My interests also extend to the philosophy of action and metaphysics. I have a particular passion for the ontology of art, although I have yet to write anything academic on the subject.

AOS: Social Ontology · Phenomenology · Moral Philosophy
AOI: Philosophy of Action · Metaphysics · Philosophy of Art

Dissertation Abstract

This work investigates groups across generations from an ontological perspective. Its aim is to identify and ground the conditions of possibility of transgenerational groups—such as families, tribes, states, and churches—as distinct social entities whose structure requires generational turnover, rather than merely permitting it. The central claim is that prevailing accounts in social ontology fail to capture this feature adequately, insofar as they treat groups primarily synchronically and address temporal extension, when they do at all, only in terms of metaphysical persistence.

In response, the inquiry proposes a phenomenological reorientation of the debate, grounded in the notion of generativity. This shift brings into view how transgenerational groups are diachronically extended wholes whose structure unfolds through processes of transmission and renegotiation, enabling subjects at different times to participate as members of one and the same collective. Examining the principles and categories governing the transgenerational bonds within these groups reveals a distinctive mode of shared life and togetherness with non-present subjects. Members are embedded in networks of normative relations that bind them not only to contemporaries but also to predecessors and successors, rendering them relatively non-independent. These bonds shape corresponding forms of group belonging and participation, and degrees of their realization. What emerges is a stratified family of groups with distinct processes of constitution and endurance. On this basis, this research argues, transgenerational groups warrant inclusion in our ontological inventory.

The analysis also shows how such groups undertake genuinely transgenerational actions—actions structurally distinct from ordinary collective ones and essential both to sustaining the generative transmission of institutions, traditions, and practices and to responding to the call of responsibility towards past and future generations. Participation in such groups and actions thus constitutes a significant mode in which personal existence—one’s own and others’—is realized in time, together. Part I introduces the conceptual framework, focusing on groups in time (Chapter 1) and generations (Chapter 2). Part II brings these resources together through an analysis of transgenerational bonds (Chapter 3) and of the diachronic constitution of transgenerational groups properly so called (Chapter 4). Part III then derives an account of transgenerational agency (Chapter 5).