My research is in epistemology and philosophy of mind, with a focus on Buddhist philosophy within the broader Sanskrit philosophical tradition. The Sanskrit philosophical texts I study are analytic and dialogical in character, with a strong emphasis on conceptual clarity and careful argumentation. They are also part of long-running conversations in which philosophers inherit arguments from their predecessors, reformulate them, and respond to interlocutors across traditions. My work combines close study of these texts and their commentarial traditions with contemporary analytic philosophy, using the latter not simply to compare traditions or trace thematic resonances, but to draw out the broader philosophical significance of the arguments found in these texts.

I am currently a Postdoctoral Research Associate in Philosophy and Religion at Princeton University, where I do research as part of the Princeton Project in Philosophy and Religion. I completed my PhD in Philosophy from Harvard University. Prior to that, I completed a Bachelor of Arts in Philosophy from Williams College. My CV can be seen here.

I was born in Parbat, Nepal, near the Dhaulagiri mountain range. I grew up in Waterloo, Belgium, and have lived in the U.S. since college.

Current Research

I am particularly interested in the sources, limits, and value of self-knowledge, its relationship to knowledge of other minds and of the world more broadly, and the role that attention plays in introspection. I think a lot about the morally formative nature of attention and have recently begun to examine attention-training practices within Buddhist and Brahmanical traditions. Through my work in Buddhist philosophy of mind, I have also become deeply interested in the metaphysics of properties, especially in the idea that properties like color, shape, or size are tropes rather than universals. I am working on several papers that develop these themes.

Dissertation Project

My PhD dissertation focuses on debates between Dharmakīrti and Kumārila on the epistemic sources (pramāṇas) of self-knowledge and between Vasubandhu and his Brahmanical and Buddhist interlocutors on the possibility of self-knowledge within the framework of Buddhist “no-self” theory (nairātmavāda). I show that these seemingly distinct debates converge on two related constraints on any adequate theory of self-knowledge: a number constraint, according to which a subject cannot know as many experiences as there are objects in the world, and a locus constraint, according to which a subject can know only experiences that belong to her own stream of consciousness. I am also expanding and revising my dissertation papers for publication

Teaching

My teaching spans philosophy of mind, epistemology, ethics, Buddhist and Sanskrit philosophy, and Sanskrit language. At Princeton, I have taught Mind and Meditation, a course on philosophical questions about the nature of mind, meditation, and attention, and I will teach Sources of Knowledge, a course on epistemology that examines the number and nature of sources of knowledge such as perception, inference and testimony. At Harvard, I taught Minds and Persons and served as a Teaching Fellow in courses on Buddhist philosophy, Indian philosophy, ethics, political epistemology, and Sanskrit.

In my classes, I aim to make difficult philosophical texts accessible without simplifying the arguments that make them interesting. I place particular emphasis on reconstructing arguments carefully, understanding the intellectual problems to which texts are responding, and helping students see philosophical works as contributions to ongoing conversations rather than as artifacts from the past. When I teach Sanskrit philosophical traditions, I also try to give students enough of the historical context and conceptual background to engage the arguments philosophically even when they have no prior background in South Asian philosophy.

Contact

I can be reached at sk2141[at]princeton[dot]edu for drafts of papers and sample syllabi.