Research overview
My work spans several subdisciplines within philosophy: philosophy of language, epistemology, Indian philosophy, history of philosophy, and aesthetics.
I’m especially interested in word meaning, extended and figurative meanings, and the nature of reference. I also think about problems in epistemology of testimony and the nature of good reasoning.
Current projects
Kumārila Bhaṭṭa’s philosophy of language
Philosophers working with Sanskrit sources sometimes compare the Mīmāṃsā philosopher Kumārila Bhaṭṭa to Aristotle. That’s because he has a significant corpus of dense philosophical work influential for an entire tradition. His work in philosophy of language theorizes about the relationship between our experience of the world and our ability to think and talk about it. He has much to say about metaphorical meaning, the role of compositionality and context in sentence meaning, hermeneutic principles for textual interpretation, the epistemology of testimony, and more.
This project involves several translations and journal articles, with the goal of a monograph setting out Kumārila’s lexical semantics systematically. As part of this project, I am collaborating with Bryan Pickel (University of Glasgow) on Kumārila’s commitment to the principle of compositionality and whether his account of meaning is propositional.
Book: Buddhist Philosophy and Its Critics
With Charles Goodman (SUNY Binghamton), I am editing and contributing translations to a volume in progress, provisionally titled Buddhist Philosophy and Its Critics. The Buddhist philosophical tradition of South Asia, like other world philosophical traditions, developed through constant exchanges, disagreements, and even formal public debates. It should be studied with this dialectic in mind. Yet, to date, most introductory readers for philosophy undergraduates present Buddhist philosophers in isolation from their interlocutors.
Buddhist Philosophy and Its Critics: An Anthology of South Asian Sources is a new volume of translations into lucid, contemporary English, including both Buddhist and non-Buddhist perspectives, thematically organized to show how these authors responded to each other and how the ideas of these entwined traditions stimulated each other’s development and increasing sophistication over time. It includes new English translations intended for a philosophical audience, ranging over topics in metaphysics and epistemology including personal identity, perception, mereology, and causation.
Series: Reading Primary Sources in Asian Philosophy
For Bloomsbury Academic Publishing, I am series editor for Reading Primary Sources in Asian Philosophy. This is a series of four volumes that confronts one of the challenges in expanding coverage of the philosophical canon: engaging with primary texts.
Instructors may not have as much experience in teaching broadly “non-Western” texts as they do others, and introductory material is sometimes scholarly, presenting a challenge for those new to a field of study. In contrast, these volumes are intended to be engaging, accessible introductions that assist readers with understanding the context of a text as well as how to read it philosophically. Chapters will focus on a single primary text, aiming to introduce English-speaking undergraduates in a philosophy classroom to how to engage with Asian philosophy. Books include: Reading Primary Sources in Indian Philosophy, Reading Primary Sources in Chinese Philosophy, Reading Primary Sources in Buddhist Philosophy, and Reading Primary Sources in Asian Political Philosophy.