Recently taught courses (syllabi available upon request):

PHIL 216—Indian Philosophy

This course is a survey of South Asian philosophy from the Vedic period to the present day. My students and I examine philosophical texts from both the Vedic tradition and a variety of śramaṇic traditions (especially Buddhism, with a focus on early Buddhism and Madhyamaka). We read selections from the Ṛgveda, the Upaniṣads, the Bhagavad-Gītā, texts from the āstika traditions (with a focus on Vedānta), as well as selections from the Buddhist Pāli canon, the Milinda Pañha, and Nāgārjuna. The final unit of the course concerns colonialism in South Asia and its effects on both Indian and European thought. Here we read selections from European philosophers such as Hegel who were influenced by Indian ideas, as well as from contemporary Indian philosophers such as A. C. Mukerji who were trained in European philosophy. We conclude by reading post-colonial theorists such as Said and Spivak to explore the epistemic dimensions of colonialism in India.

Tying the themes of the course together is a question about the status of Indian thought: is it really “philosophy”? In the first sessions of our class, we read contemporary perspectives on this question which reveal how this question directly concerns issues of inclusion and exclusion in the philosophy classroom. Throughout the course, and especially during the final unit on colonial and post-colonial Indian thought, we return these questions about inclusion. By examining the ways the European intellectual tradition has distinguished itself from—and yet has also been deeply indebted to—the Indian tradition, this course challenges students to think critically about the categories of the “West” vs. the “East”. By focusing attention on the role of colonialism in constructing knowledge systems, the course also invites students to consider how such perspectives can occlude and delegitimize other worldviews. These specific explorations of issues surrounding diversity, equity, and inclusion in the Indian philosophical context open up a broader question for my students: what really is philosophy, anyways? Ultimately the course aims to broaden students’ philosophical horizons by showing how Indian philosophical perspectives can enrich our understanding of perennial and universal questions of the human experience.

I developed this course for the Philosophy department at Sewanee specifically to help diversify their offerings in underrepresented philosophies, and was awarded a pedagogy grant by the Office of the Dean to support its development and its focus on DEI issues. This course fulfills Sewanee’s G7 General Education requirement “Encountering Perspectives: Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion”.

During Spring 2021, Dr. Arudra Burra (IIT Delhi) visited our class to speak on the topic of decolonizing philosophy in the contemporary Indian context.

PHIL 232—Business Ethics

In this course, my students and I examine the role of work in a fulfilling human life. The average American spends more than half of their waking life at work. Is spending so much time and energy at work an impediment to our happiness? Or can work be a means to fulfillment? How exactly does work figure in a good life? These are questions that everyone who works for a living can benefit from asking. But answering these questions requires us to think about the nature of work: what is work? How does work differ from leisure? Is work an intrinsic feature of human life, or is it imposed from outside? What makes some kinds of work fulfilling and others unfulfilling?

These questions may seem abstract, but how we answer them will directly affect our decision-making about concrete, practical issues in the real world: for example, how we think managers should treat their subordinates, how business owners should treat their employees, or how representatives should shape policy to serve their constituents. These ‘abstract’ philosophical questions thus show themselves to be practically important, while the ‘real world’ issues show themselves to be philosophically grounded.

My students and I draw together these two kinds of concerns—the abstract and the concrete, the theoretical and the practical—and examine how they are connected. To do so, we divide our time between (1) discussing philosophical texts about work and (2) discussing real-world case studies of business ethics scenarios. Through in-class discussions and out of class writing assignments, we reflect on how the ideas from these texts and the examples from those case studies mutually inform one another.

PHIL 101—Know Thyself

In this course, my students and I explore how philosophers across diverse intellectual traditions have posed questions about the nature of the self and about the value of self-knowledge. The topic of the self serves as our entry point into a variety of domains of philosophic inquiry, including ethics, political theory, epistemology, ontology, and aesthetics. Here we address a network of related questions about the self. What is the self? Is there a stable self that underlies our shifting perceptions, thoughts, emotions, and beliefs? What is our nature as human beings? Is it even possible to know ourselves? If so, how do we arrive at such knowledge? And what are the stakes of self-knowledge, or the consequences of ignorance of ourselves? How does our knowledge of ourselves affect our actions? How do art and artifice form, or distort, our conceptions of ourselves? How do different facets of our identity, such as race, gender, and sexual orientation, constitute our self-understanding and our ways of being in the world?

My students and I raise these questions through our engagement with primary sources in the history of European and South Asian philosophy, as well as with contemporary philosophy of the Black experience. Here we read texts by Plato, René Descartes, Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia, David Hume, John Locke, Catharine Trotter Cockburn, the authors of the Buddhist Pāli canon, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, John Berger, Nancy Tuana, W.E.B. Du Bois, James Baldwin, and Audre Lorde.