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.