The Oxford Handbook of Social Ontology

Stephanie Collins is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at Monash University. Her work focuses on collective agency, collective responsibility, and other topics in social ontology, political philosophy, and normative ethics. Her books are Organizations as Wrongdoers: from Ontology to Morality (Oxford University Press, 2023), Group Duties: Their Existence and Their Implications for Individuals (Oxford University Press, 2019), and The Core of Care Ethics (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015).

Brian Epstein is Professor of Philosophy at Tufts, specializing in social ontology, philosophy of social science, and social cognition. He is the author of The Ant Trap: Rebuilding the Foundations of the Social Sciences (Oxford University Press, 2015), winner of the Lakatos Award and the Gittler Award, Social Ontology (Cambridge University Press, 2025), and the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on Social Ontology. Epstein has published many articles on individualism, metaphysics, social groups, group cognition, and the relation between social ontology and social theory. He received his PhD from Stanford, MA from Oxford, and AB from Princeton. Sally Haslanger is Ford Professor of Philosophy and Women's and Gender Studies at MIT. She also teaches in D-Lab, a hands-on program using participatory design to create inclusive, accessible, and sustainable solutions to global poverty challenges. Broadly speaking, her work links issues of social justice concerning gender, race, class (and other social categories) with contemporary work in epistemology, metaphysics, philosophy of language. She was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2015 and won a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2018.Hans Bernhard Schmid is the professor of Political and Social Philosophy of the University of Vienna, Austria. Besides Social Ontology, his areas of specialization include Phenomenology, Existentialism, and the Philosophy of the Social Sciences. Previous positions include a SNF Research Professorship at the University of Basel, Switzerland, where he had obtained his doctoral and habilitation degrees.