Office Hours – 2023W term 2:

• Not teaching in 2023W term 2

My research engages Sanskritic pre-modern South Asian philosophies with a focus on how these traditions contribute to our contemporary understanding of human experience. I work within the Classical South Asian pramāṇa framework, which focuses on what and how we can know about reality given our embodied position within an intersubjective world. I find that the 7th century Buddhist Dharmakīrti’s apoha (exclusion) theory of concept formation, especially as modified by the 10th-11th century Hindu Pratyabhijñā Śaiva tradition, offers compelling insights into fundamental questions surrounding the intersubjective construction of selfhood, the nature of attention, and experiences of pain.

• “Beyond Time, Not Before Time: The Pratyabhijñā Śaiva Critique of Dharmakīrti on the Reality of Beginningless Conceptual Differentiation.” Philosophy East and West, Volume 70, Number 3 July 2020; early access online through PEW.
• “Review of Human Being, Bodily Being, by Chakravarthi Ram-Prasad.” MIND, 2019. Doi: 10.1093/mind/fzz052
• “Is There an Ideal Scientific Image? Sellars and Dharmakīrti on Levels of Reality.” Wilfrid Sellars and Buddhist Philosophy: Freedom from Foundations. Edited by Jay Garfield. Routledge, 2019, pp. 48-66.
• “Karmic Imprints, Exclusion, and the Creation of the Worlds of Conventional Awareness in Dharmakīrti’s Thought.” Sophia, Vol. 57,  2018: 313-335.
• “Shifting Concepts: The Realignment of Dharmakīrti on Concepts and the Error of Subject/Object Duality in Pratyabhijñā Śaiva Thought.” The Journal of Indian Philosophy, Vol. 45, 2017: 21-47.

• “Mental Perception or Reflexive Awareness? What a Distinction from Classical South Asia Reveals about Introspection.” American Philosophical Association Eastern Annual Meeting (upcoming in January 2020, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania)
• “Abhinavagupta on the Transformation of Pain.” American Academy of Religion Annual Meeting (upcoming in November 2019, San Diego, California)
• “Selfhood and the Value of Pain.” Canadian Philosophical Association Annual Congress (June 2019, Vancouver, BC, Canada)
• “At the Limits of Pain: Attention, Exclusion, and Self-Knowledge in Pratyabhijñā Śaivism.” Virtues of Attention Global Philosophical Perspectives III: Workshop on Mind, World, and Attention (April 2019, New York University, New York)
• “Why Care about Freedom and Agency?” American Philosophical Association Central Annual Meeting (February 2019, Denver, Colorado)
• “Subverting the Monological Ideal by Embracing the Nonhuman World: How Abhinavagupta’s Nondual Ontology Could Support Charles Taylor’s Dialogical Ethics.” American Academy of Religion Annual Meeting (November 2018, Denver, Colorado)
• “How to Bring Words to Life: Apoha as the Transition between Nonconeptual and Conceptual Language in Pratyabhijñā Śaivism.” The 2018 Toshihide Numata Book Award Symposium “Meaning in the World and in Texts: Thoughts on Buddhist Philosophy of Language” (November 2018, University of California, Berkeley)
• “Beyond Time, Not Before Time: Affirming the Beginningless Reality of Conceptual Differentiation in Indian Philosophy,” Columbia Society for Comparative Philosophy, Columbia University (February 2018, New York, New York)
• “Conventional Truth When There Is No Conventional Reality: Understanding Dharmakīrti on Conventional vs. Ultimate Means of Trustworthy Awareness,” XVIIth Congress of the International Association of Buddhist Studies (August 2017, Toronto, Canada)