I am Assistant Professor of Philosophy in the Department of Philosophy at the College of Charleston. I came to Charleston right after completing my doctorate at the Australian National University in 2005. I did my undergraduate work in philosophy at the University of Bucharest, where I also obtained an M.A. in 1993. I spent nearly four and a half years in India in the mid 1990s, pursuing studies in Indian and Buddhist Philosophy. While in India, I was affiliated with several research institutes, including the Asiatic Society in Calcutta (as a Research Fellow, 1995-1996), the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute and De Nobili College in Pune (1993), and the Central Institute of Higher Tibetan Studies, Sarnath, Varanasi (1996).

In 1997 I moved to Australia, and the following year I began graduate school at the Australian National University in Canberra. I spent the greater part of 2000 working on a proof of concept model for parsing Sanskrit based on the Interlingua system (the project was funded by a small ARC grant). Between November 2000 and March 2001 I was a visiting PhD student at Queens' College, Cambridge, L'Institut de Civilisation Indienne, Paris, and the Central Institute of Higher Tibetan Studies, Sarnath, Varanasi.

My research interests are fairly broad, ranging from classical Indian and Buddhist philosophy to Hellenistic philosophy (for my M.A. disseration I worked on Plotinus' conception of psychanodia), phenomenology, and consciousness studies. My most recent work focuses on classical Indian and Buddhist theories of perception, the contemporary reception of the Dignāga-Dharmakīrti school of Buddhist epistemology, and the intersections between phenomenology and cognitive science.

"Mind in Indian Buddhist Philosophy," The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2009 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.)

"Naturalism and Intentionality: A Buddhist Epistemological Approach," Asian Philosophy, 19/3 (November 2009): 239-264.

"Buddhist Foundationalism and the Phenomenology of Perception," Philosophy East and West, 59:4 (October 2009): 409-439.

"Karma, Rebirth, and Mental Causation," in Charles Prebish, Damien Keown, and Dale S. Wright, Revisioning Karma: the eBook, Journal of Buddhist Ethics Online Books, 2007, pp. 133-154.

"An Essay on the Ascension of the Soul in Neoplatonism," Origins 3 (2003) 156-67

"Hermeneutics in a Buddhist Perspective," Origins 2002, 1: 145-50.

"The Continuity Between Madhyamaka and Yogācāra Schools of Mahāyāna Buddhism in India," Journal of the Asiatic Society (1996) 37, 2: 48-83.

Review of Simon P. James, Zen Buddhism and Environmental Ethics, Sophia (April 2008) 47, 1: 75-77.

Review of David E. Cooper and Simon P. James, Buddhism, Virtue, and Environment, Sophia (July 2007) 46, 2: 207-209.

"A Restricted Interpretation of Dharmakirti's Philosophy," Review of John Dunne, Foundations of Dharmakirti's Philosophy, H-Buddhism Reviews, March 2006.

A Review Essay of Destructive Emotions: How Can We Overcome Them? A Scientific Dialogue with the Dalai Lama. Journal of Buddhist Ethics 11/1 (2004): 98-102.

Since coming to the College of Charleston I have been teaching a range of topical courses in Metaphysics, Epistemology, Philosophy of Religion, and Indian and Buddhist Philosophy. I have also team taught (with seven other colleagues from across the School of Humanities) the Colloquium in Western Civilization course for the Honors College. Besides teaching regular classes, I often supervise independent research studies and bachelor's essays.

FALL 2009

PHIL 320 - Metaphysics
HONS 170 - Honors Introduction to Philosophy.

COURSES TAUGHT

PHIL 450 - Senior Seminar in Philosophy
PHIL 307 - 20th Century Continental Philosophy
PHIL 320 - Metaphysics
PHIL 298 - Hermeneutics: Interpreting Across Boundaries
PHIL 298 - Eastern Philosophy
PHIL 255 - Philosophy of Religion
PHIL 234 - Eastern Philosophy
PHIL 198 - Philosophies of Asia
PHIL 101 - Introduction to Philosophy: Beliefs and Values
PHIL 102 - Introduction to Philosophy: Knowledge and Reality
HONS 120 - Colloquium in Western Civilization

Liber Mundi - a practically defunct blog (I hope to revive it and move it to the cofc domain soon).

This past Spring (2009) I taught a capstone seminar on Consciousness, Intentionality, and Embodiment and experimented with the idea of a course blog.

Sanskrit Unicode Text Processing (for those using Emacs and LaTex on Linux machines; I moved to Mac OS X after the 10.2 system was released and never looked back).