Allison Aitken

Allison Aitken

Research Interest

Asian Philosophy (esp. Indian and Tibetan Buddhist Philosophy)
Early Modern Philosophy (esp. Locke)

Allison Aitken

Assistant Professor | Columbia University

A.B., Harvard College (2013)

Ph.D., Harvard University (2020)

Allison Aitken joined the department in 2021. Her research centers on non-standard theories of relations and dependence structures in the history of metaphysics, both South Asian as well as early modern European. She is currently working on two projects: the first is a defense of the Madhyamaka Buddhist ontological dependence structure understood as a kind of metaphysical indefinitism; the second is an interpretation of the Lockean person as a relation. Before coming to Columbia, Professor Aitken was a Bersoff Faculty Fellow in the Department of Philosophy at New York University.

Selected Publications

"Introduction to Reality: Śrīgupta’s Tattvāvatāravṛtti", Harvard Oriental Series, Harvard University Press, forthcoming.

“No Unity, No Problem: Madhyamaka Metaphysical Indefinitism,” Philosophers’ Imprint 21, no. 31 (2021): 1-24.

“The Truth about Śrīgupta’s Two Truths: Longchen Rabjampa’s ‘Lower Svātantrikas’ and the Making of a New Philosophical School,” Journal of South Asian Intellectual History 3, no. 2 (2021): 185–225.

“Somethings and Nothings: Śrīgupta and Leibniz on Being and Unity,” Philosophy East and West 70, no. 4 (2020): 1022-1046. (with Jeffrey K. McDonough).

“Śāntarakṣita: Climbing the Ladder to the Ultimate Truth,” in The Routledge Handbook of Indian Buddhist Philosophy, eds. William Edelglass, Pierre-Julien Harter, and Sara McClintock, 463–479. New York: Routledge, 2022.

“A Case Against Simple-Mindedness: Śrīgupta on Mental Mereology,” Australasian Journal of Philosophy, forthcoming.

“Chomden Reldri on Dharmakīrti’s Examination of Relations,” in Histories of Tibet, eds. Kurtis Schaeffer, Jue Liang, and William McGrath, Studies in Indian and Tibetan Buddhism. Boston: Wisdom Publications, forthcoming.