Ilaria Canavotto

Ilaria Canavotto is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Philosophy within the College of Arts and Humanities at the University of Maryland. Her academic work focuses on formal logical frameworks applied to legal reasoning, normative systems, and philosophical problems of agency.

Her research centers on deontic logic, STIT logic, and the resolution of inconsistent precedents in legal contexts. Key interests include normative reasoning, causal responsibility, counterfactuals grounded in voluntary imagination, and the dynamics of open-textured predicates. She develops computational models for piecemeal knowledge acquisition in normative systems and refines logical structures for agency and responsibility through STIT semantics.

Analysis of her recent publications reveals a strong trend toward integrating dynamic deontic logic with legal AI applications, particularly in modeling inconsistent case bases and deriving actual prescriptions from ideal norms. Her work bridges philosophical logic with practical legal reasoning challenges, emphasizing choice-driven counterfactuals and the metaphysical foundations of structured entities in normative contexts.