I am Associate Professor in the Philosophy Department at William & Mary. My primary area of research is in Buddhist philosophy. 

Research

My work concerns the distinction that Buddhist philosophers draw between two different kinds of truth: conventional truth and ultimate truth. My overall research goal is to explain, compare, and critically assess the views about conventional and ultimate truth defended by different Buddhist thinkers and to do so in a way that engages with relevant contemporary work in analytic metaphysics, epistemology, and philosophy of mind. My research is both exegetical and constructive, as well as cross-cultural, drawing on resources from both classical Indian and contemporary Western analytic traditions.

I am interested in questions about what is real, whether there are different ways to be real, and whether there is a fundamental level to reality and what it might be like. I am also interested in how the answers to these metaphysical questions impact views about the nature of cognition, what cognition is about, and what it takes for a cognition to be veridical. These views are also related to Buddhist views of the meaningfulnes of language and what makes statements true. I am also interested in Buddhist accounts of the epistemic processes that generate knowlege and how these are informed by their metaphysics.

Teaching

I enjoy teaching courses that introduce students to a diversity of philosophical thought. I do this in tradition-oriented courses on Buddhist and Indian Philosophy. I also teach introductory and topic-centered courses in the philosophy of mind, epistemology, and metaphysics in a way that explores various culturally diverse approaches to the central topics of the course. I also teach a course in meta-philosophy that explores what philosophy is, in a global context, and examines what constitutes good cross-cultural philosophical methodology. For advanced undergraduates I enjoy teaching seminars specifically on topics in Buddhist metaphysics, epistemology, and philosophy of mind.