Benossi, Lis
PhD in Philosophy, Stanford University
About
I just defended my Ph.D. in Philosophy at Stanford University (!)
In 2026/2027, I will be visiting FU Berlin thanks to the generous support of the Freie Universität Berlin Graduate Exchange Fellowship.
My research focuses on history of modern philosophy, ethics and especially Immanuel Kant.
Through my work on Kant, I have developed interests in moral psychology, epistemology –especially on voluntary assent and self-deception–, self-knowledge and philosophy of mathematics. In phil of math, I am particularly inserted in early modern conceptions of number.
In my dissertation, I explore how moral failure is possible according to Kant.
To explain moral failure, I advance a novel reconstruction of Kant on rationalization (Vernünfteln). I argue that rationalization doesn’t just arise in relation to immoral actions, but it can also infect what we hold-to-be-true. I show how it differs from both self-deception and moral failure, while being an essential ingredient in both.
I further connect this account of rationalization with the difficult story of moral failure and radical evil Kant offers in Religion Within the Boundaries of Mere Reason.
Before doing philosophy at Stanford, I was fortunate to be a part of the Cologne Center for Contemporary Epistemology and the Kantian Tradition (CONCEPT), where I had the most wonderful mentors and colleagues. I also became increasingly fascinated with Kantian epistemology.
I obtained my MSc in Logic from the Institute of Logic, Language and Computation (ILLC, Amsterdam University), where I tried to give a cognitively plausible logical model of counterfactual reasoning and pretend play.
I received a BA in Philosophy from the Università degli Studi di Padova, where I got really into logic’s normativity for reasoning.