Fabrizio Macagno

Fabrizio Macagno is Assistant Professor of Philosophy and Communication at the Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Portugal, where he teaches courses on Argumentation, Philosophy of Education, and Rhetoric. He is doing research in the fields of Argumentation and Philosophy of Language.

Fabrizio Macagno graduated with a Ph.D. in Linguistics from Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore in Milan in 2008. His dissertation, supervised by Prof. Eddo Rigotti, advanced a new approach to definition, in which the ancient Aristotelian approach to semantics is applied to argumentation theory. His background is in Philology and Linguistics, and during his Master Degree he further specialized in Logic and Argumentation, a groundbreaking field of research aimed at merging the logical, linguistic and communication studies in a unitary approach to human reasoning and textual interpretation. Such field, largely developed in North America, is substantially attracting the interest of the scientific community all over the world for its application to the fields of education, politics, law and artificial intelligence.

Fabrizio Macagno has been working on argumentation theory since 2004, when he taught classes on Informal Logic at the University of Winnipeg, Manitoba (Canada). He then worked on a research project on computing in argumentation at the University of Dundee, Scotland, under the supervision of Professor Chris Reed. In 2005 he came back to Italy and began a PhD on the problem of definition in argumentation. In 2006 he taught and worked as a research assistant at the University of Winnipeg. He authored or co-authored several papers on definition, argumentation schemes, interpretation and analogy that were published in international peer-reviewed journals. In 2008 he defended his PhD dissertation, The Argumentative Uses of Definition, in which he proposed an original approach to semantic analysis and textual interpretation. Such work has been disseminated through the publication of several articles and papers presented at international conferences. The same year he concluded a parallel four-year research project on argument schemes in collaboration with professors Douglas Walton and Chris Reed. The results of such investigation were published in a book Argumentation Schemes, published by Cambridge University Press. Since then he has applied his research to the field of law, and inquired into the patterns and strategies of reasoning used in legal debates and decision-making. Such work has been disseminated by the publication of papers in national and international journals.