Benossi, Lis

About

I am a late-stage Ph.D. candidate in Philosophy at Stanford University. My research focuses on Kant’s practical philosophy, with particular focus on evil, failures of rationality, and moral psychology. I also have long-standing interests in Kant’s theory of self-knowledge and his philosophy of mathematics.

My dissertation examines Kant’s conception of radical evil in Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason. I argue that Kant’s account of “rationalization”—a defective pattern of reasoning that cultivates inattentiveness to conclusive reasons in favour of inconclusive ones—reveals a structural connection between epistemic failures of rationality, such as self-deception, and voluntary failures, such as akrasia.

Before coming to Stanford, I earned a B.A. in Philosophy from the University of Padua and an M.Sc. in Logic from the Institute for Logic, Language, and Computation at the University of Amsterdam. I also spent three years at the Cologne Center for Contemporary Epistemology and the Kantian Tradition.