Santiago Zabala is an EU citizen born in 1975. He was raised in Rome, Vienna, and Geneva. He is now living in Baltimore. He was first educated at the International Schools of Vienna and Geneva, where he obtained his Full International Baccalaureate in 1995. He then went on to study philosophy at the University of Turin. In 2002 he obtained his M.A. there with a thesis (published in English and Italian) under the supervision of Gianni Vattimo and in 2006 his Ph.D. (summa cum laude) from the Pontifical Lateran University of Rome. In November 2007 he was awarded the Humboldt Research Fellowship by Germany's Alexander von Humboldt Foundation for the years 2008/2009. He is currently a Visiting Scholar at Johns Hopkins University.


During the past years he has been invited to conferences by many institutions, including Georgetown University, Johns Hopkins University, the New School (New York), Université de Montreal, University of Rome La Sapienza, University of Rome Roma Tre, Universidade do Vale do Rio dos Sinos, Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio de Janeiro, Universität Potsdam, University of Deusto in Bilbao, and the University of Girona. He taught in Prof. G. Vattimo’s Theoretical philosophy seminars (during the academic years 2003-2004 and 2004-2005) at the University of Turin; in Prof. A. Ortiz-Osés Hermeneutics course (during the academic years 2006-2007 and 2007-2008); and in Prof. M. Cruz History of Contemporary Philosophy course (during the academic years 2007-2008). He is a member of the APA (American Philosophical Association), the CPA (Canadian Philosophical Association), and SPEP (Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy).


He is the author of The Remains of Being: Hermeneutic Ontology after Metaphysics (2009), The Hermeneutic Nature of Analytic Philosophy: A Study of Ernst Tugendhat (2008), and editor of G. Vattimo’s Art’s Claim to Truth (2008) and Nihilism and Emancipation (2004) and Richard Rorty and Gianni Vattimo's The Future of Religion (2005), all published by Columbia University Press and translated into several languages. He also edited Weakening Philosophy (2007) with contributions from Charles Taylor, Jean-Luc Nancy, Umberto Eco, Richard Rorty, Jack Miles, Fernando Savater, Nancy Frankenberry, Rüdiger Bubner, Jean Grondin, James Risser, Manfred Frank, Gianni Vattimo and others. This book was published by McGill-Queen's University Press in 2007 and is now being translated into Italian (Garzanti Publisher) and Spanish (Anthropos Publisher). With Jeff Malpas he has co-edited Consequences of Hermeneutics: Fifty Years after Truth and Method with contributions from B. Babich, G. Warnke, G. Vattimo, H.-H. Köegler, R. Valgenti, C. Jamme, W. McNeill, J. Grondin, J. Risser, R. Dostal, C. Prado, L. K. Schmidt, N. Davey, P. Vandevelde, M. Marder, R. Palmer, and others, forthcoming from Northwestern University Press in 2010. His forthcoming book, coauthored with Gianni Vattimo, is Hermeneutic Communism: After Realism Conservative Impostions.

He collaborates with many journals, including the International Journal of Philosophical Studies, Journal of the History of Philosophy, Common Knowledge, Telos, Symposium: Canadian Journal of Continental Philosophy, Aquinas, Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas, Books in Canada, Iride, Claves de Razón Práctica, Iris. European Journal of Philosophy and Public Debate and with Gianni Vattimo he is the series editor of the Davies Group Publishers Series Contemporary European Cultural Studies, of the Valter Casini Editore series Interpretazioni, of Transeuropa Publishers series Differenze, and of the Zikkurat Publishers series Interpretazioni dal mondo.