Participants
Jake Davis holds an M.A. in Philosophy from the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa and is a currently doctoral candidate in Philosophy and Cognitive Science at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, where he is pursuing research at the intersection of philosophical psychology, moral psychology, and Buddhist philosophy. Drawing on suggestions from the Pāli Nikāyas as well as recent empirical work on mindfulness meditation, his dissertation project develops an account of attention and the ethics of emotion.
Douglas Duckworth is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at East Tennessee State University. He works on the relationship between ontology and epistemology in Buddhism, particularly in the Nyingma school. He is interested in the intersections between phenomenological and ontological approaches to meaning and exploring how subjectivity, consciousness, and body both constitute and ensue from these encounters. He is the author of Mipam on Buddha-Nature: The Ground of the Nyingma Tradition (SUNY, 2008) and Jamgön Mipam: His Life and Teachings (Shambhala, 2011). He also translated Distinguishing the Views and Philosophies: Illuminating Emptiness in a Twentieth-Century Tibetan Buddhist Classic by Bötrül (SUNY, 2011).
Charlotte Eubanks is Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature, Japanese, and Asian Studies at the Pennsylvania State University. She works on literary Buddhism and on the intersections of Japanese literary, visual, and performance-based arts. Her first book Miracles of Book and Body: Buddhist Textual Culture and Medieval Japan (University of California Press, 2011) is a study of the relation between human body and sacred text, exploring practices of reading, the nature of text, and the sensual aspects of religious experience. She is in the early stages of formulating a second book, tentatively titled Performing Mind: Zen Buddhism and the Enacting of Consciousness.
Joel Feldman is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Rider University in Lawrenceville, New Jersey. His primary area of research is Indian philosophy, especially the metaphysical disputes between Buddhism and Nyàya during the classical period. He is particularly interested in the Buddhist theory of momentariness, and the broader problem of identity over time for both persons and objects, both in the Indian tradition and in contemporary analytic philosophy. He is (with Stephen Phillips) co-author of Ratnakīrti's Proof of Momentariness by Positive Correlation: Kṣaṇabhaṅgasiddhi Anvayātmikā: Transliteration, Translation, and Philosophic Commentary (American Institute for Buddhist Studies, 2012).
Ellen Fridland is a post-doc in philosophy of mind at the Berlin School of Mind and Brain and visiting assistant professor of philosophy at Humboldt University of Berlin. She works primarily in the areas of philosophy of mind, philosophical psychology, and philosophy of cognitive science. She wrote her dissertation on the cognitive penetrability of perception by skill at the CUNY Graduate Center. Recently, she has been working on a theory of skill learning that provides a naturalized account of the development of conceptual thought. She has published on learning, knowing how, and proprioception.
Nada Gligorov is Assistant Professor of Medical Education at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine, and Assistant Professor of Bioethics at the Union Graduate College/Mount Sinai Bioethics Program. She received her PhD in Philosophy from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. One of the themes of her work is the interaction between commonsense and scientific theories. She has published articles on personal identity as it relates to biomedical issues such as advanced directives and the human microbiome. She is also interested in determinism and free will, and the implications of brain imaging technologies on mental privacy. She is currently working on a monograph entitled Philosophy of Mind and the Foundations of Neuroethics.
Laura Guerrero has a M.A. in philosophy from the University of Hawaii and is currently a Ph.D. candidate in philosophy at the University of New Mexico, where she is specializing in East-West comparative philosophy with an emphasis on Indian Buddhist thought. Her dissertation focuses on the work of the 7th Century Buddhist philosopher Dharmakīrti and argues that he is best understood as presenting a kind of pragmatist account of truth and knowledge.
Constance Kassor is a Ph.D. candidate in the Graduate Division of Religion at Emory University. Her research interests include Indian and Tibetan Buddhist thought, specifically the Madhyamaka tradition according to the Sakya school of Tibetan Buddhism. Her current work focuses on the philosophy of the 15th-century Tibetan scholar Gorampa Sonam Senge, and his understanding of the relationship between conceptual thought and nonconceptuality.
Philipp Koralus is post-doc in philosophy at the Washington University in St. Louis. He specializes on the intersection of the philosophy of language and mind, linguistics, and cognitive neuroscience. His current research focuses on the development of an approach to the philosophy of language that connects with cognitive science more substantively than traditional approaches. He is also collaborating with researchers at Dartmouth and Duke on a neuroimaging project that is providing evidence that the brain systems underlying moral judgments about different types of transgressions are less unified than has been thought.
Jared Lindahl joins Warren Wilson College as a Professor of Religious Studies in the fall. He received his Ph.D. in Religious Studies from the University of California, Santa Barbara in 2010. His dissertation and ongoing research in Indian and Tibetan Buddhism investigates the significance of light-related meditation experiences and their relation to luminosity as a key metaphor for characterizing the nature of mind. His work also engages experimental cognitive science as a method for grounding an analysis of practices and resultant experiences in the mechanisms of the brain and body.
Matthew MacKenzie is (effective June 2012) Associate Professor of Philosophy at Colorado State University. He specializes in Buddhist and Indian philosophy, philosophy of mind, and metaphysics. His research takes a cross-cultural, interdisciplinary approach to questions of consciousness, selfhood, and embodiment. He has published in, e.g., Philosophy East & West, Asian Philosophy, Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, and in the Self, No Self? (OUP, 2011). He is currently working on a co-authored book titled Enacting Wisdom: Phenomenology, Cognitive Science, and Asian Philosophy and a book titled Luminous Consciousness: A Defense of the Reflexivity of Experience.
Keya Maitra is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of North Carolina, Ashville. She specializes in Indian philosophy, philosophy of mind and philosophy of language. She is the author of On Putnam (Wadsworth, 2002).
Emily McRae is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Oklahoma. She specializes in ethics, feminism and Tibetan Buddhist philosophy. Much of her work is devoted to issues regarding the emotions, morality and contemplative practices such as meditation. She has published articles on the role of passionate emotions in Buddhist ethics and the nature of choice in the context of emotional experience. She is currently working on a philosophical taxonomy of the Buddhist therapies of the emotions.
Jennifer McWeeny is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Worcester Polytechnic Institute. She received her Ph.D. in Philosophy from the University of Oregon in 2005 and her M.A. in Philosophy from the University of Hawai'i, Mānoa in 2000. Her research and teaching interests are in the areas of phenomenology, philosophy of mind, epistemology, Continental philosophy, feminist philosophy, and Asian and comparative philosophy. Her articles have appeared in Continental Philosophy Review, Hypatia, Journal for Critical Animal Studies, and Simone de Beauvoir Studies, among other venues. She is a past executive secretary of the Eastern Division of the Society for Women in Philosophy and a co-founder of the Feminist Working Group Initiative. McWeeny's current projects include co-editing Liberating Traditions: Essays in Feminist Comparative Philosophy and writing a book on embodied phenomenology.
Riccardo ("Rick") Repetti is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Kingsborough Community College, CUNY. His publications focus on free will in analytic philosophy and Buddhism. Rick is interested in meditation, contemplative philosophy, consciousness, self, agency, and responsibility. Author of The Counterfactual Theory of Free Will: A Genuinely Deterministic Form of Soft Determinism (LAP Lambert, 2010), Rick has published articles on the ethics of teaching philosophy, contemplative pedagogy, and Buddhism and free will, and is currently writing another monograph on free will and another on Buddhism and free will.
Robert Sharf is the D.H. Chen Distinguished Professor of Buddhist Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. In addition to his appointment in EALC he serves as Chair of the Center for Buddhist Studies and Director of the Group in Buddhist Studies. He works primarily in the area of medieval Chinese Buddhism (especially Chan), but he also dabbles in Japanese Buddhism, Buddhist art, ritual studies, and methodological issues in the study of religion. He is author of Coming to Terms with Chinese Buddhism: A Reading of the Treasure Store Treatise (2002), co-editor of Living Images: Japanese Buddhist Icons in Context (2001), and is currently working on a book tentatively titled How to Read a Zen Koan.
John Spackman is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Middlebury College. He received his Ph.D. in Philosophy from Yale University, and also has an M.A. in Religion, focusing on Buddhist thought, from Columbia University. He has published articles in the philosophy of mind, Buddhist philosophy, metaphysics, and aesthetics. His primary research interests focus on recent debates between conceptualism and nonconceptualism about perceptual, religious, and aesthetic experience, and on issues in the metaphysics of mind, especially with reference to Buddhist thought.
Eiji Suhara holds an M.A. in Philosophy from the University of Hawai'i at Mānoa and a Ph.D. from the Arizona State University. He is currently Instructor in the Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures, University of Pittsburgh. He specializes in the study of epistemological concepts in Buddhism from both phenomenological and cognitive scientific perspectives.
Joerg Tuske is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Salisbury University in Maryland. He has published several articles on Indian Philosophy, especially in the areas of epistemology, logic and philosophy of mind. At Salisbury University he is also the Coordinator of the South Asian Studies minor and the Director of a Study Abroad program with Pune University and S.P. College, Pune.
Robin Zebrowski is Assistant Professor of Cognitive Science at Beloit College. She works on questions of embodiment in cognitive science. Her work and publications have focused on applying conceptual metaphor theory to problems of AI and questions of consciousness generally, and she has been exploring how the extended mind hypothesis challenges and re-frames those same problems. She examines the concept of embodiment in cognitive science, asking whether humans truly share a single sort of embodiment, and the implications for communication if we don’t. She has been building a cognitive science program at Beloit College, a small, liberal arts college in the Midwest.
