Visiting Faculty

Anita Avramides is Southover Manor Trust Fellow and Tutor in Philosophy, St Hilda's College, Oxford University. Her latest work has concentrates on the question of our knowledge of other minds, and specifically on the issue whether this is a well formed question. She ties this work in with issues concerned with knowledge of one’s own mind. Her work on other minds has led her to look at the history of this issue. She also continues to maintain an interest in issues connected with Grice’s account of meaning. She is the author of Meaning and Mind: An Examination of a Gricean Account of Language (MIT Press, 1989), Other Minds (Routledge, 2000), and Women of Ideas (Duckworth, 1995).

Akeel Bilgrami received a B.A in English Literature from Elphinstone College, Bombay University and went to Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar where he read Philosophy, Politics, and Economics. He has a Ph.D in Philosophy from the University of Chicago. He is the Sidney Morgenbesser Professor of Philosophy at Columbia University, where he is also a Professor on the Committee on Global Thought. He was the Director of the Humanities Center at Columbia University for seven years and is currently the Director of its South Asian Institute. His publications include the books Belief and Meaning (1992), Self-Knowledge and Resentment (2006), and Secularism, Identity and Enchantment (2014). He is due to publish two short books in the near future: What is a Muslim? and Gandhi's Integrity. His long-term future work is on the relations between agency, value, and practical reason.

Arindam Chakrabarti is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Hawaii, Manoa. He holds an M.A. in Philosophy from Presidency College, Kolkata, and a D.Phil from Oxford University, which was supervised by Sir Peter Strawson and Michael Dummett. He has taught at Calcutta University, Asiatic Society Calcutta, University College London, University of Washington, Seattle, and Delhi University. From Fall 2018, he will occupy the Nirmal and Augustina Mattoo Chair of Classical Indic Humanities in the Department of Philosophy, SUNY Stony Brook. Trained as an analytic philosopher of language, he spent decades receiving traditional training in Indian logic (Navya Nyāya). He has edited or authored  sixteen books in English, Sanskrit, and Bengali, including Denying Existence (Kluwer, 1997) and the Bloomsbury Research Handbook of Indian Aesthetics and Philosophy of Art (2016). He is currently finishing “The Book of Questions: Introduction to Indian Philosophical Analysis” (Penguin, India) and “Realisms Interlinked” (Bloomsbury).

Georges Dreyfus is a specialist in the fields of Tibetology and Buddology, with a particular interest in Indian Buddhist philosophy, and Jackson Professor of Religion at Williams College. In 1985 he was the first Westerner to receive the Geshe Lharampa degree, the highest available within the Tibetan scholastic tradition. He is the author of Recognizing Reality: Dharmakirti’s Philosophy and its Tibetan Interpretations (SUNY, 1997), The Sound of Two Hands Clapping: the Education of a Tibetan Buddhist Monk (University of California Press, 2003), and with Sara McClintock, The Svatantrika-Prasangika Distinction: What Difference Does a Difference Make? (Wisdom, 2003).

Alison Gopnik is an internationally recognized leader in the study of children’s learning and development and was the first to argue that children’s minds could help us understand deep philosophical questions. She is a columnist (every other week) for The Wall Street Journal. Gopnik is a professor of psychology and affiliate professor of philosophy at the University of California at Berkeley. She is the author of over 100 journal articles and several books, including Words, Thoughts and Theories (co-authored with Andrew Meltzoff, MIT Press, 1997), The Scientist in the Crib (co-authored with Andrew Meltzoff and Patricia Kuhl, William Morrow, 1999) and the highly acclaimed The Philosophical Baby (Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2009).

Sheridan Hough is an author, philosopher, poet, and Professor of Philosophy at the College of Charleston. A graduate of the University of California at Berkeley, Hough has taught at the University of Houston, and has held a visiting appointment at Colgate University as NEH Professor of the Humanities in Philosophy. Her areas of specialization include 19th and 20th Century Continental Philosophy, especially the work of Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, phenomenological conceptions of the self and subjectivity, and the connections between philosophy and literature. She is the author of Kierkegaard's Dancing Tax Collector: Faith, Finitude, and Silence (OUP 2015), Nietzsche's Noontide Friend; The Self as Metaphoric Double (Penn State Press 1997), a novel, Mirror's Fathom (Mercer 2012), and a volume of poetry, The Hide (Inleaf Press 2007). She is currently the President of the North American Kierkegaard Society.

Birgit Kellner serves as Director of the Institut für Kultur- und Geistesgeschichte Asiens. She holds an MA in Tibetan and Buddhist Studies from the University of Vienna and a PhD in Indian Philosophy from the University of Hiroshima. She was Visiting Assistant Professor in Buddhist Studies at the University of California at Berkeley. She has held the position of Professor in Buddhist Studies at the Cluster of Excellence “Asia and Europe in a Global Context” of the University of Heidelberg. In 2014 she was elected Corresponding Member of the Austrian Academy of Sciences. She is the author of Nichts bleibt nichts (Wien 1997) and Jñānaśrīmitra’s Anupalabdhirahasya and Sarvaśabdābhāvacarcā (Wien 2007), and co-editor of Religion and Logic in Buddhist Philosophical Analysis (with Horst Lasic and Eli Franco, Wien 2005), and Pramāṇakīrti (with H. Krasser, H. Lasic, Michael-Torsten Much, and H. Tauscher, Wien 2007).

Michelle Montague is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Texas at Austin. She received a PhD in philosophy from the University of Colorado, Boulder, in 2002, and she has taught at the University of California, Irvine (2002- 2007), and at the University of Bristol (2008-2013), and has held visiting appointments at Princeton University, MIT, ANU, the University of Copenhagen, and the University of London. Her primary interests are in philosophy of mind, philosophy of language and metaphysics. She is the author of The Given: Experieince and Its Content (OUP, 2016).

Shaun Nichols is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Arizona. He works on experimental philosophy, cultural evolution, free will, and cognitive theories of the imagination. He received his PhD. in Philosophy from Rutgers and his BA in Philosophy from Stanford. He is the author of Mindreading: An Integrated Account of Pretense, Self-awareness and Understanding Other Minds (OUP, 2003), Sentimental Rules: On the Natural Foundations of Moral Judgment (OUP, 2004), and of three edited volumes, The Architecture of the Imagination (OUP, 2006), Experimental Philosophy (with Josh Knobe, OUP, 2008), and Moral Psychology: Historical and Contemporary Readings (with Nadelhoffer, T., Nahmias, John Wiley & Sons, 2012)

Vasu Reddy is Professor of Developmental and Cultural Psychology and Director of the Centre for Situated Action and Communication at the University of Portsmouth, U.K. She works on the origins and development of social cognition, mainly in young infants, on the role of emotional engagement in social understanding, and on the nature and influence of cultural engagements on social understanding. She is the author of How Infants Know Minds(Harvard University Ppress, 2008) and (with G. Mireault) of Humour in Infancy: Developmental and Psychological Perspectives (Springer, 2016).

Mark Siderits taught philosophy for many years at Illinois State University, and most recently at Seoul National University. His principal area of research interest is analytic metaphysics as it plays out in the intersection between contemporary analytic philosophy and classical Indian and Buddhist philosophy. He is the author of Indian Philosophy of Language (Kluwer, 1991), Personal Identity and Buddhist Philosophy: Empty Persons (Ashgate, 2003, 2nd edition, 2015), and Buddhism as Philosophy (Ashgate and Hackett, 2007), Studies in Buddhist Philosophy (OUP, 2015), co-editor of Self, No Self? (wth Evan Thompson and Dan Zahavi, Oxford, 2011), of Apoha: Buddhist Nominalism and Human Cognition (with Arindam Chakrabarti and Tom Tillemans, Columbia, 2011), and translator (with Shōryū  Katsura) of Nāgārjuna’s Middle Way (Wisdom, 2013).

Susanna Siegel is Edgar Pierce Professor of Philosophy at Harvard University. She currently works on topics in the philosophy of mind and epistemology, especially the nature and function of perception. She is author of The Contents of Visual Experience (OUP, 2010), and The Rationality of Perception (OUP, 2017), and has published numerous articles about the epistemic roles of attention, the epistemic status of inattentive experiences, the impact of prior cognitive states on perceptual experience, and other topics in the philosophy of perception.

Dan Zahavi is Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Center for Subjectivity Research at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark. In his systematic work, Zahavi has mainly been investigating the nature of selfhood, self-consciousness and intersubjectivity. He has authored and edited more than 20 books and written more than 100 articles. His most important monographs include Self-awareness and Alterity (Northwestern, 1999), Husserl’s Phenomenology (Stanford, 2003), Subjectivity and Selfhood (MIT, 2005), The Phenomenological Mind (with Shaun Gallagher) (Routledge 2008/2012), Self and Other: Exploring Subjectivity, Empathy, and Shame (OUP, 2014), and Husserl’s Legacy (OUP, 2017). His edited books include Self, No Self? (with Mark Siderits and Evan Thompson) (OUP, 2011),The Oxford Handbook of Contemporary Phenomenology (OUP, 2012), and The Oxford Handbook of the History of Phenomenology (OUP, 2018).