After graduating from Columbia University with a degree in Philosophy and special concentration in Linguistics, I earned an MLitt at the University of St Andrews on a Fulbright grant. During undergrad I developed a fascination with Kant’s philosophical system that stuck. I was drawn to Western ideas of secularism, humanism, and the enlightenment and how they interrelated with contemporary understandings of non-Western philosophy, in particular modern Buddhism.
Starting with my undergraduate dissertation, I became motivated by the philosophical project of synthesizing elements of Kant’s practical philosophy with foundational elements of Early Buddhism. I hope to go beyond merely comparing “Western” and “Non-Western” traditions, or treating the latter unsystematically. Rather, I hope the project might expand into a unified synthetic system that clarifies both contemporary Buddhism and Kantianism.
I believe Western Buddhists—like myself—can use Kant to develop a critical orientation towards themselves. And other thinkers around Kant help approach an interrelated and indispensable project—critiquing our social reality and critiquing the contemporary legacy of the Western enlightenment: thinkers like Rousseau, Hegel, and Marx, and (other) critical theorists.
The College of Arts