Lorenzo Spagnesi

I am a postdoctoral researcher and lecturer at Trier University (Germany). I am Research Fellow in the DFG project Inductive Metaphysics and I am part of the Trier Kant Research Centre. I received my PhD from the University of Edinburgh in 2021. My research is focused on Kant, the philosophy of science, and metaphysics.

Idealizations are ubiquitous in the sciences. As is often noted, despite being unrealistic representations, they seem to provide us with key understanding of the world. My project aims at reconciling idealization and knowledge of nature via a (Kant-inspired) regulative account of science. It has two sub-projects: a historical and a systematic one. In the historical subproject, I offer a unified interpretation of Kant’s philosophy of science and metaphysics of nature. In the systematic subproject, I develop a regulative account of rationality in science with respect to problems of modeling, understanding, and realism. The project is multidimensional (encompassing historical, conceptual, and practice-based approaches) and responds to the need to understand how we can rely on ideal assumptions to acquire knowledge and what makes the decisions based on them trustworthy.