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. She earned a PhD from Harvard University in a joint program bridging the Departments of South Asian Studies and Philosophy. Before joining Columbia, she was a Bersoff Faculty Fellow in the Department of Philosophy at New York University. Prof. Aitken's research centers on non-standard theories of relations and dependence structures in the history of metaphysics, with a particular focus on Sanskrit and Tibetan Buddhist philosophical traditions. She also has interests in Classical Indian Philosophy more broadly as well as Early Modern European Philosophy. She is currently completing a book manuscript (under contract with Oxford University Press) on the Madhyamaka Buddhist ontological dependence structure understood as a kind of metaphysical indefinitism.

Selected Publications

“Vasubandhu on the Mind-Body Problem: From Atomism to Idealism,” in Oxford Studies in Philosophy of Mind, vol. 5, ed. Uriah Kriegel (forthcoming)

“Nāgārjuna and Vasubandhu on the Principle of Sufficient Reason,” Asian Journal of Philosophy 3, no. 19 (2024): 1–28.

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

"Chomden Reldri on Dharmakīrti's Examination of Relations" Histories of Tibet: Essays in Honor of Leonard W. J. van der Kuijp, eds. Kurtis Schaeffer, Jue Liang, and William McGrath, 283–305. Wisdom Publications, 2023.

“A Case Against Simple-Mindedness: Śrīgupta on Mental Mereology,” Australasian Journal of Philosophy, published online 2023.

“An Appearance-Reality Distinction in an Unreal World” Analysis 82, no. 1 (2022): 114–130.

“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.

“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).