Ph.D. Candidate
About
My current research interrogates the possibility of accessing, understanding, and renewing nonwestern philosophical sources and ideas—particularly Chinese and Arabic—from the complex methodological and institutional scenario said study is currently entangled in. My dissertation, in particular, dissects the field of comparative philosophy (and derivative fields such as world, cross-cultural, transcultural, and fusion philosophy) by examining its major methodological models, their unstated epistemological, ontological, and axiological assumptions, and their commonly attributed pluralist and subversive ramifications. In doing so, my dissertation undertakes two subtasks. First, it investigates the possibility of comparative philosophical inquiry by looking at the epistemic restraints traditionally attributed to and purportedly imposed by Western (liberal and colonial) modernity. Second, it tests and complements the prior methodological critique by conducting a heuristic study on selected premodern Chinese and Arabic philosophical corpora—the Poetics (Šiʿr), Psychology (Nafs, IV-V), and Metaphysics (Ilāhiyyāt, VIII-X) of Abū ʿAlī ibn Sīnā’s (“Avicenna,” d. 1037 AD / 428 AH) Book of Healing (Kitāb al-šifā’), and passages from Zhu Xi’s 朱熹 (d. 1200 AD) Yulei 語類 and Shi ji zhuan 詩集傳.
Research interests: comparative philosophy; classical Islamicate philosophy (especially Ibn Sīnā); late imperial Chinese philosophy (especially daoxue); comparative political theory; philosophical historiography; translation theory.
Languages: Spanish (native); Italian (advanced); Classical Chinese (intermediate reader); Classical Arabic (intermediate reader); French (intermediate reader); Modern Chinese (beginner).
Committee: Aileen Das (chair), Cameron Cross, David Porter, Niloofar Sarlati, Jinli He.
