Lanxin Shi

Hello! I am Lanxin Shi. I come from Nanjing, China. I am currently a sixth-year PhD candidate in the Sage School of Philosophy at Cornell University. I earned a B.A. in Humanities from NYU Shanghai in 2021. I was a guest scholar at Søren Kierkegaard Research Centre during summer 2024.

My research lies at the intersection of ethics, moral and religious psychology, and nineteenth- and twentieth-century European philosophy, especially Kierkegaard, phenomenology, and existentialism. I am interested in how agents form and sustain ethical commitments, how they understand and respond to different types of normative demands, and how ethical agency can become frustrated. 

My dissertation develops an interpretation of Kierkegaard’s account of agency through four important yet underexplored concepts in his corpus: existential trial, eternal happiness, religious responsibility, and the demonic. I argue that these concepts reveal an intriguing account of an agent whose identity is formed through conflict, risk, and responsiveness to norms that exceed immediate desire or social convention. 

Beyond my dissertation on Kierkegaard, I also work on Beauvoir's normative theory.

My email is ls794[at]cornell[dot]edu. 

You can also find me on PhilPeople.