Ned Block

Ned Block (Ph.D., Harvard), Silver Professor of Philosophy and Psychology, came to NYU in 1996 from MIT where he was Chair of the Philosophy Program. He works in philosophy of mind, foundations of neuroscience, and cognitive science and is currently writing a book on consciousness. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, has been a Guggenheim Fellow, a Senior Fellow of the Center for the Study of Language and Information, a Sloan Foundation Fellow, a faculty member at two NEH Institutes and two NEH Seminars, the recipient of fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies and the National Science Foundation; and a recipient of the Robert A. Muh Award in Humanities and Social Science from MIT. He is a past president of the Society for Philosophy and Psychology, a past Chair of the MIT Press Cognitive Science Board of Syndics, and past President of the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness. The Philosophers' Annual selected his papers as one of the "ten best" in 1983, 1990, 1995 and 2002. He is co-editor of The Nature of Consciousness: Philosophical Debates (MIT Press, 1997). The first of two volumes of his collected papers, Functionalism, Consciousness and Representation, is forthcoming from MIT Press. ←

Susan Carey

Susan Carey (Ph.D., Harvard) is a professor in the Laboratory for Developmental Studies at Harvard University. She has also taught psychology at NYU and MIT. She’s received numerous fellowships and honors, most recently from the National Academy of Science. Carey has written extensively on human cognition. Her published books include: Astuti, R., Solomon, G., and Carey, S. (in preparation). Cross-cultural studies of essentialism: Kinds and individuals. Carey, S. (in preparation). The Origin of Concepts. MIT Press. Carey, S. & Gelman, R. (Eds.) (1991). T„i. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum. Carey, S. (1985). Conceptual Change in Childhood. Cambridge, MA: Bradford Books, MIT Press. ←

Georges B.J. Dreyfus

Georges Dreyfus (Ph.D., University of Virginia) is Professor of Religion and Chair of the Department of Religion at Williams College. He received an M.A. and Ph.D. in the history of religion from the University of Virginia. His dissertation, Ontology, Philosophy of Language, and Epistemology in Buddhist Tradition, was done under the direction of Paul Jeffrey Hopkins. He serves as the co-chair for the Tibetan and Himalayan Religions Group at the American Academy of Religion and is also a member of their Steering Committee. His languages of specialization include Tibetan, Sanskrit, and Pali.

He has published 5 books, including Tibetan Interpretations (1997) and The Sound of Two Hands Clapping: the Education of a Tibetan Buddhist Monk (2002), and many articles. He was the recipient of a Foreign Language Area Study Fellowship in 1988-89, a Fulbright Fellowship to India in 1989-90, and a National Endowment for the Humanities award in 1994-95. ←

Owen Flanagan

Owen Flanagan (Ph.D., Boston University) is James B. Duke Professor of Philosophy and Co-Director of the Center for Comparative Philosophy. He is also Professor of Psychology and Brian Science, and Professor of Neurobiology at Duke University. In 1999-2000, Dr. Flanagan held the Romanell Phi Beta Kappa Professorship awarded by the national Phi Beta Kappa office to an American philosopher for distinguished contributions to philosophy and to the public understanding of philosophy.

Dr. Flanagan works primarily on the mind-body problem, moral psychology, and the conflict between the scientific and the humanistic image of persons. He is the author of The Science of the Mind, MIT University Press, 1991; Varieties of Moral Personality, Harvard University Press, 1991; Consciousness Reconsidered, MIT University Press, 1992; Self-Expressions: Mind, Morals and the Meaning of Life, Oxford University Press, 1996, and Dreaming Souls: Sleep, Dreams and the Evolution of the Conscious Mind, Oxford University Press, 2000), and The Problem of the Soul: Two Visions of Mind and How to Reconcile Them (Basic, 2002). His newest book, The Bohisattva's Brain: Neuroscience, Virtue, and Happiness, will be completed this summer and published by MIT Press. He is Templeton Fellow at USC in 2005-2006 and will give six lectures this February at USC entitled "Human Flourishing in the Age of Mind Science." The lectures will appear as a book, publisher to-be-determined. He has also published numerous articles including several recent articles on the nature of the virtues; the moral emotions; Buddhism, Confucianism; and the scientific status of psychoanalysis. ←

Paul C. Gailey, Ph.D.

Paul Gailey is a physicist currently serving as Senior Science Advisor to the Fetzer Institute and Director of Research for the Fetzer-Franklin Fund. He earned his graduate degrees from the University of North Carolina and the University of Utah, and has worked in the areas of electromagnetic theory, nonlinear dynamics, and random processes particularly as they relate to living systems. During his career, Dr. Gailey served as a Research Scientist for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, a Research Director at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and as Associate Professor of Physics and Astronomy at Ohio University. Parallel to his research and research management activities, he has engaged in a lifelong study of spiritual traditions and how they relate to the philosophy of science. During the past ten years, he has served variously as consultant, Vice President, and Senior Advisor to the Fetzer Institute working to promote a deeper cultural dialogue on science and spirituality – particularly regarding how our conception of science is interacting with human values and sense of meaning. ←

Jay Garfield

Jay Garfield (Ph.D.) teaches and pursues research in the philosophy of mind, foundations of cognitive science, logic, philosophy of language, Buddhist philosophy, cross-cultural hermeneutics, theoretical and applied ethics and epistemology. He is director of the logic program and teaches at Smith College.

Jay is also director of the Five College Logic Program and the Five College Tibetan Studies in India Program, an exchange program between the Five Colleges and the Tibetan universities in India and so most Januaries takes groups of students to study Buddhist philosophy at the Central Institute of Higher Tibetan Studies in India. Jay is also a member of the Graduate Faculty of Philosophy at the University of Massachusetts, is Adjunct Professor of Philosophy at the Central Institute of Higher Tibetan Studies and Professor of Philosophy at the University of Melbourne.

Jay's most recent book is Empty Words: Buddhist Philosophy and Cross-Cultural Interpretation (Oxford University Press 2002). He and the ven Prof Geshe Ngawang Samten are currently translating the Fourteenth-Fifteenth Century Tibetan Philosopher Tsong Khapa's commentary on Nagarjuna's Mulamadhyamakakarika (Ocean of Reasoning). Jay is also working on projects on the development of the theory of mind in children with particular attention to the role of pretence in that process; the impact of teaching philosophy in primary schools on the development of citizenship values, the law of noncontradiction; and the history of Buddhist idealism in India and Tibet (especially the impact of Sthiramati) ←

Piet Hut

Piet Hut (M.Sc., University of Utrecht; Ph.D., University of Amsterdam) is currently a professor at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. His main research interest concerns investigations of the structure of the world, from different points of view. His work as an astrophysicist aims at increasing our understanding of the physical world on the largest scales in time and space, by studying the history of the Universe. Interdisciplinary collaborations have allowed him to branch out from astrophysics per se to physics in general, as well as to geology and paleontology, where he has found each discipline to rely on remarkably different views of the material world. In addition, his research in computer science showed yet other views of the world, when seen in the light of structures of information. And over the last several years he has attempted to summarize what he has learned in these various areas through some journeys into natural philosophy. ←

Roger Jackson

Roger R. Jackson (M.A., Ph.D, Wisconsin) teaches the religions of South Asia at Carleton College. His special interests include Indian Buddhist philosophy, Tibetan ritual and meditative practices, Asian religious poetry, the study of mysticism, and Buddhism vis à vis modernity. He is author of Is Enlightenment Possible? (1993) and Tantric Treasures (2004), co-author of The Wheel of Time: Kalachakra in Context (1985), co-editor of Tibetan Literature: Studies in Genre (1996) and Buddhist Theology (1999), and author of numerous scholarly and popular articles and reviews. He served for many years as editor-in-chief of The Journal of the International Association of Buddhist Studies. He currently teaches at and serves on the board of Gyutö Wheel of Dharma Monastery in Minneapolis. ←

Thubten Jinpa

Thupten Jinpa (Ph.D., Cambridge University) was trained as a monk at the Shartse College of Ganden Monastic University, South India, where he received the Geshe Lharam degree. In addition Jinpa holds B.A. Honors in philosophy and Ph.D. in religious studies, both from Cambridge University. He taught for five years at Ganden and worked also as a research fellow in Eastern religions at Girton College, Cambridge University.

Jinpa has been a principal English translator to H.H. the Dalai Lama for nearly two decades and has translated and edited numerous books by the Dalai Lama including Ethics for the New Millennium, Transforming the Mind, and The World of Tibetan Buddhism. His own publications include works in both Tibetan and English, the most recent book being Self, Reality and Reason in Tibetan Philosophy.

Jinpa teaches as an adjunct professor at the Faculty of Religious Studies at McGill University, Montreal. He is currently the president of the Institute of Tibetan Classics and heads its project of critical editing, translation and publication of key classical Tibetan texts aimed at creating a definitive reference series entitled The Library of Tibetan Classics. ←

Anne Klein

Anne Klein (Ph.D., University of Virginia) is a professor at Rice University. Her focus within Asian Studies is on the Buddhist traditions, with special attention to Tibet and India. In particular she is interested in Buddhist philosophy and its nuanced descriptions of mind, contemplative practice, and theories of knowing. Above all, her books examine the role of the intellect in relation to spiritual experience of various kinds. ←

Joseph E. LeDoux

Joseph E. LeDoux (Ph.D. 1977, State University of New York, Stony Brook) a neuroscientist and Professor at the Center for Neural Science, New York University, seeks a biological rather than psychological understanding of our emotions. He explores the differences between emotional memories (implicit—unconscious—memories) processed in pathways that take information into the amygdala, and memories of emotion (explicit—conscious—memories) processed at the level of the hippocampus and neocortex.

Joseph LeDoux has written the most comprehensive examination to date of how systems in the brain work in response to emotions, particularly fear. Among his fascinating findings is the work of amygdala structure within the brain. He is the author of The Emotional Brain: The Mysterious Underpinnings of Emotional Life, and Synaptic Self: How Our Brains Become Who We Are; coauthor (with Michael Gazzaniga) of The Integrated Mind, and editor with W. Hirst of Mind and Brain: Dialogues in Cognitive Neuroscience. ←

Joseph Loizzo

Joseph Loizzo (M.D., NYU; Ph.D., Columbia) is Clinical Assistant Professor of Psychiatry in Complementary and Integrative Medicine at Weill Cornell Medical College, where he researches and teaches mind/body health. He also teaches science and religion, the scientific study of religious experience, and Indo-Tibetan mind sciences at Columbia University. Dr. Loizzo is a Harvard-trained psychiatrist and Columbia-trained Buddhist scholar with over thirty years' experience studying the beneficial effects of meditation on healing and learning.

In 1998, Dr. Loizzo opened the Center for Meditation and Healing at Columbia-Presbyterian/Eastside, the first mind/body center in the United States to offer programs in stress reduction, self-healing, and lifestyle change based on the Tibetan health and mind sciences. In 2003, he moved these programs to the Cornell Center for Complementary and Integrative Medicine, to better test and refine their effectiveness. He founded Nalanda Institute of Meditation and Healing in Eastside Manhattan in 2005, to make these programs available to the community at large. ←

Robert Pollack

Robert E. Pollack (Ph.D., Brandeis University) is professor of biological sciences, lecturer in psychiatry at the Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research, adjunct professor of science and religion at Union Theological Seminary, adjunct professor of religion at Columbia University, and Director of the Center for the Study of Science and Religion at Columbia University. Dr. Pollack graduated from Columbia University with a B.A. in physics, and received a Ph.D. in biology from Brandeis University.

He has been a professor of biological sciences at Columbia since 1978, and was dean of Columbia College from 1982-1989. He received the Alexander Hamilton Medal from Columbia University, and has held a Guggenheim Fellowship. He currently is on the advisory boards of Columbia/Barnard Hillel, the Fred Friendly Seminars, the Program in Religion and Ecology of the Center for the Study of World Religions at Harvard University, and as a Senior Consultant for the Director, Program of Dialogue on Science, Ethics, and Religion, American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). He is a Fellow of the AAAS, and the World Economic forum in Davos; and a member of the American Psychoanalytic Association and director and chair of the Scientific Advisory Board of Tapestry Pharmaceuticals Inc. and a director of Nutrition 21, Inc. He is the author of Signs of Life: The Languages and Meanings of DNA, (Houghton Mifflin/Viking Penguin, 1994) The Missing Moment: How the Unconscious Shapes Modern Science, (Houghton Mifflin, 1999); and The Faith of Biology and the Biology of Faith: Meaning, Order and Free Will in Modern Medical Science, (Columbia University Press, 2000). Signs of Life received the Lionel Trilling Award and has been translated into six languages. ←

Stephen Phillips

Stephen Phillips (Ph.D., Harvard) is a Sanskritist and specialist in classical Indian thought. ; He is author of over forty articles and author or co-author of four books: Aurobindo's Philosophy of Brahman (Brill, 1986), Classical Indian Metaphysics: Refutations of Realism and the Emergence of "New Logic" (Open Court, 1995, Indian edition, Motilal Banarsidass, 1998), Gangesa on the Upadhi, the "Inferential Undercutting Condition," Introduction, Translation, and Explanation (with N. S. Ramanuja Tatacharya, Indian Council of Philosophical Research, 2002), and Epistemology of Perception: Gangesa's Tattvacintamani, Vol. I, pratyaksa-khanda, introduction, translation, and commentary (with N. S. Ramanuja Tatacharya, forthcoming, Motilal Banarsidass). He is currently working on a four-volume translation of and commentary on the most important work of late classical Indian philosophy, Gangesa's Tattvacintamani (Jewel of Reflection on the Truth of Epistemology), which founded the 'New Logic' school in the fourteenth century. He has been Visiting Professor at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. ←

W. Teed Rockwell

Teed Rockwell (Ph.D., Union Institute & University) began his philosophical studies with a strong interest in Continental philosophy, especially Heidegger, Nietzsche and Hegel, he now studies how philosophical presuppositions about mind and reality affect the practices of scientific researchers, especially in biology, psychology and the cognitive sciences. Much to his own surprise, he has become a philosopher of science in the Anglo-American Analytic tradition. He sees the American pragmatists, especially John Dewey, as the root that connects these two allegedly conflicting traditions.

Teed has had articles published in Behavior and Philosophy, Philosophical Psychology, Minds and Machines, the Journal of Consciousness Studies, The Journal of the John Dewey Society, and in the Dictionary of the Philosophy of Mind. He has presented papers at meetings of the American Philosophical Association, The Society for Philosophy and Psychology, and the Southern Society of Philosophy and Psychology, among others. His MIT Press Book Neither Brain nor Ghost (2005) rejects both dualism and the mind/brain identity theory, and argues that the mind is a “behavioral field” that fluctuates within the brain/body/world nexus. Teed is in the philosophy department at Sonoma State University. ←

Mark Siderits

Mark Siderits (Ph.D., Yale) is a student of Buddhist and classical Indian philosophy. His research explores the possibility that contemporary analytic philosophy might have something to learn from the Sanskrit philosophical tradition. For instance his most recent book, Empty Persons, is meant to show how Buddhist philosophical tools shed light on the current debate over the nature of diachronic personal identity, or what it is that makes someone one and the same person over time. He has also done work on Indian and comparative philosophy of language, and is currently working on some issues in comparative epistemology. His next book, Buddhism As Philosophy (forthcoming from Ashgate), is a text, with readings, on the Indian Buddhist philosophical tradition. He is also working with Shoryu Katsura on a new translation of and commentary on Nagarjuna’s Madhyamakakarika. Outside of philosophy his interests include cooking (especially Indian cooking), and skiing. ←

Gareth Sparham

Gareth Sparham (Ph.D., University of British Columbia) was a Buddhist monk from 1973 to 2001 and now teaches Tibetan Language at the University of Michigan. He received a Ph D. in Asian Studies from the University of British Columbia in 1989 for his dissertation on the 8th century Indian Buddhist writer Haribhadra. He is the author and translator of a number of works, most recently Tsong kha pa's explanation of Tantric morality published as Tantric Ethics: An Explanation of the Precepts for Buddhist Vajrayana Practice (Wisdom Publications 2005), the morality chapter in volume three of The Great Treatise on the Stages of the Path to Enlightenment (Snow Lion 2004), and Abhisamayalamkara with Vritti by Arya Vimuktisena and Aloka by Haribhadra (Jain Publishing, 2005). ←

Evan Thompson

Evan Thompson is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Toronto. He works in the areas of cognitive science, philosophy of mind, phenomenology, and comparative philosophy. He received his A.B. in Asian Studies, and his M.A. and Ph.D. in Philosophy from the University of Toronto. He is the co-author (with Francisco Varela and Eleanor Rosch) of the groundbreaking book, THE EMBODIED MIND: COGNITIVE SCIENCE AND HUMAN EXPERIENCE (MIT Press, 1991), one of the first books to explore systematically the relationship between Buddhist philosophy and cognitive science, and to argue for the "embodied" approach in cognitive science. Thompson is also the author of COLOUR VISION: A STUDY IN COGNITIVE SCIENCE AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF PERCEPTION. His new book, MIND IN LIFE: BIOLOGY, PHENOMENOLOGY, AND THE SCIENCES OF MIND, will be published by Harvard University Press in 2007. He is also the co-editor, with Philip David Zelazo and Morris Moscovitch of the forthcoming CAMBRIDGE HANDBOOK OF CONSCIOUSNESS.←

Robert A.F. Thurman

Robert A.F. Thurman (Ph.D., Harvard) is the Jey Tsong Khapa Professor of Indo-Tibetan Buddhist Studies in the Department of Religion at Columbia University, President of the Tibet House U.S., a non-profit organization dedicated to the preservation and promotion of Tibetan civilization, and President of the American Institute of Buddhist Studies, a non-profit affiliated with the Center for Buddhist Studies at Columbia University and dedicated to the publication of translations of important texts from the Tibetan Tanjur. ←

Professor Thurman is the translator of many philosophical treatises and sutras, and the author of numerous books including the national bestseller, Inner Revolution: Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Real Happiness; Anger (the fifth book from a series on the "seven deadly sins"); and most recently, The Jewel Tree of Tibet: The Enlightenment Engine of Tibetan Buddhism. Thurman's other writings and lectures have examined Asian history, particularly the history of the monastic institution in the Asian civilization; and critical philosophy, with a focus on the dialogue between the material and inner sciences of the world's religious traditions. In 1997, Time magazine chose Robert Thurman as one of its twenty-five most influential Americans. ←

Gary Tubb

Gary Tubb (A.B., A.M., Ph.D., Harvard) has studied Sanskrit and Indian Studies at Harvard University and in India, and has taught at Harvard, Brown, Vassar, and Columbia. He offers courses on Sanskrit language and literature and on the literary, religious, and philosophical traditions of India. In his research he is especially interested in Sanskrit literary theory and related scholastic traditions. He has written primarily on Sanskrit poetry and poetics. ←

Robert Van Gulick

Robert Van Gulick (Ph.D., University of California at Berkeley) is professor and chairman of the philosophy department at Syracuse University. His work has focused on the philosophy of mind and philosophy of psychology, including such topics as mental representation, intentional content, reduction, emergence, self-consciousness, and mental causation. He is the Director of the University's Cognitive Science Program and has been the President of the Society for Philosophy and Psychology (2001-02). He was an NEH Fellow in 2001-02 and is currently completing a book on consciousness. ←

William Waldron

Professor Waldron (Ph.D., University of Wisconsin) teaches courses on the South Asian religious traditions of Hinduism and Buddhism, Tibetan religion and history, comparative psychologies and philosophies of mind, and theory and method in the study of religion. His publications focus on the Yogacara school of Indian Buddhism and its dialogue with modern thought. Professor Waldron, Chair of the Religion Department, has been at Middlebury College since 1996. ←

B. Alan Wallace

B. Alan Wallace (M.A., Ph.D., Stanford) is president of The Santa Barbara Institute for Consciousness Studies. He trained for many years as a monk in Buddhist monasteries in India and Switzerland. He has taught Buddhist theory and practice throughout the world since 1976 and has served as interpreter for numerous Tibetan scholars and contemplatives, including H. H. the Dalai Lama. After graduating summa cum laude from Amherst College, where he studied physics and the philosophy of science, he earned his M.A. and Ph.D. in religious studies at Stanford University. He has edited, translated, authored, and contributed to more than thirty books on Tibetan Buddhism, medicine, language, and culture, and the interface between science and religion ←

His published works include Choosing Reality: A Buddhist View of Physics and the Mind (Snow Lion, 1996), The Taboo of Subjectivity: Toward a New Science of Consciousness (Oxford, 2000), Buddhism and Science: Breaking New Ground (Columbia University Press 2003), Balancing the Mind: A Tibetan Buddhist Approach to Refining Attention (Snow Lion, 2005), and Genuine Happiness: Meditation as the Path to Fulfillment (John Wiley & Sons, 2005). ←

Edith Wyschogrod

Edith Wyschogrod (Ph.D., Columbia University) has been the Croghan Visiting Professor of Religion at Williams College, a guest Professor of Philosophy at Villanova, and is currently the J. Newton Rayzor Professor of Philosophy and Religious Thought at Rice University. Her current interests include: genetic, social, cultural and philosophical interpretations of altruism. And “how not to speak about God: recent rhetorical strategies in the configuring of transcendence.” She teaches a full range of courses in both Philosophy and Religious Studies departments. Her published works include: The Ethical: Blackwell Readings in Continental Philosophy, co-edited with Gerald McKenny (London: Blackwell, 2002), The Enigma of Gift and Sacrifice, Introduction and co-editor with Jean-Joseph Goux and Eric Boynton. (New York: Fordham University Press, 2001), An Ethics of Remembering: History, Heterology and the Nameless Others (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), Saints and Postmodernism: Revisioning Moral Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), and the forthcoming Crossover Quests: Tarrying with Negatives, Embodying Philosophy’s Others, (Fordham University Press), Spring 2006. ←