In both Analitici e continentali and Breve storia, Franca D'Agostini performs a critical-reconstructive historiography in order to clarify the fate and meaning of philosophical practice in contemporaneity.

At the core of these early writings is the essential metaphilosophical question: what are the nature and rules governing philosophy, its methods and styles, its relations with literature and science, its applications and its public use?

D'Agostini’s metaphilosophical studies reach their culmination with the 2005 volume Nel chiuso di una stanza con la testa in vacanza.

Dieci lezioni sulla filosofia contemporanea (Carocci, 2005), which contains a reasoned and ample illustration of the nature of philosophical practice and the key themes of metaphilosophical reflection.

Here D'Agostini presents an image of philosophy as conceptual analysis, addressing in particular the "super-concepts" once called the "transcendentals" (unity, truth, goodness, and all their derivatives and synonyms).

In Disavventure della verità (2002) she reconstructs the history of the self-contradictory statement "the truth does not exist," from the critiques of Plato and Aristotle to the declarations of Nietzsche, to contemporary nihilism and relativism.

[8] Introduzione alla verità (2011) presents contemporary theories of truth and outlines an original perspective, as a particular version of "alethic realism."

"[9] The essential points of this study are: the "inevitable use" of the fundamental philosophical concepts (unum, verum, bonum), the fundamentally skeptical nature of the predicate of truth, the location of the problem of truth within a perspective of "first philosophy" at the intersection of the three areas of ethics, ontology and epistemology, the idea that the methodology of this first philosophy presupposes an ontological gap encompassing nonexistent objects, universals, and unrealized possibilities.