Lucy Allais

Lucy Allais is a philosopher who holds academic positions at both the University of the Witwatersrand and Johns Hopkins University. Her research interests include the philosophy of Immanuel Kant, transcendental idealism as well as forgiveness, punishment, and bioethics.

Education and Career

Allais received an undergraduate degree in philosophy and art history from the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits), Johannesburg, moving on to gain both a masters (B.Phil.) and D.Phil. at the University of Oxford. Following her D.Phil., Allais taught for three years at Oxford, before moving to the University of Sussex in 2004. Between 2006 and 2008 Dr. Allais taught at the University of Witwatersrand. Beginning in 2008, Allais held a joint position between the University of the Witwatersrand, where she is now a full professor, and the University of Sussex. In 2014 she moved from Sussex to the University of California, San Diego, as the Henry E. Allison Chair of the History of Philosophy, keeping her joint appointment at the Witwatersrand. She left UCSD for Johns Hopkins in 2021.

Selected Works

Is appearance a reasonable reflection of reality? Lucy Allais, in her work “Manifest Reality: Kant's Idealism and His Realism” offers an original interpretation of things which appear to us are also independent in themselves. The objects that are stitched and woven (intuited) together in the mind, do not not necessarily correlate with the objects in the world. Allais argues that we should understand Kant’s notion of intuition and the cognitive filters by which we come to know things in themself. Space and time are not things in themselves, but exist in relation to things. Allais suggests distinction between things in themselves and how they appear has epistemological and metaphysical components. In her book, she both addresses the many competing interpretations of transcendental idealism.
Allais, L. (2015). Manifest reality: Kant's idealism and his realism (First edition ed.). Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.