ALLISON AITKEN
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Allison Aitken 
aeaitken@g.harvard.edu
Department of South Asian Studies
Department of Philosophy
Harvard University
Cambridge, MA 02138
 
EDUCATION​
Harvard University, Joint Ph.D., South Asian Studies and Philosophy, expected May 2020
  • Dissertation Project I: “Against Unity and Being: Śrīgupta’s Metaphysical Indefinitism”
  • Dissertation Project II: “A Relation-Interpretation of the Lockean Person”
  • Committee: Parimal Patil (South Asian Studies and Philosophy), Leonard van der Kuijp (South Asian Studies), Alison Simmons (Philosophy), and Jeffrey McDonough (Philosophy)
Harvard College, Joint A.B., South Asian Studies and Comparative Study of Religion, 2013

AREAS OF SPECIALIZATION
Asian Philosophy (esp. Indian and Tibetan Buddhist Philosophy), Early Modern Philosophy 

AREAS OF COMPETENCE
Metaphysics, Philosophy of Religion, Medieval Philosophy 

DISSERTATION SUMMARY
My research centers on non-standard theories of dependence and relations in the history of metaphysics, both South Asian and European. I have two interrelated projects: the first is a defense of Madhyamaka Buddhist metaphysical indefinitism; the second is an interpretation of the Lockean person as a relation. My dissertation comprises papers from both projects. 

PUBLICATIONS
ARTICLE
“Somethings and Nothings: Śrīgupta and Leibniz on Being and Unity,” with Jeffrey McDonough, Philosophy East and West (2019): doi: 10.1353/pew.0.0189
    
FORTHCOMING BOOK
Introduction to Reality: A Tibetan Critical Edition, Annotated English Translation, and Philosophical Introduction to Śrīgupta’s Tattvāvatāravṛtti, under contract with Harvard Oriental Series, Harvard University Press

UNDER REVIEW
“The Truth about Śrīgupta’s Two Truths: Longchenpa’s ‘Lower Svātantrikas’ and the Making of a New Philosophical School”

WORKS IN PROGRESS
“Madhyamaka Metaphysical Indefinitism”
“Can a Mind have Parts? Śrīgupta on Mental Mereology”
“Parts within Parts: Madhyamaka Mereological Indefinitism”
“Fathers, Friends, and Foes: Locke’s Relational Account of Persons”
“Epistemological Payoffs of a Relation Interpretation of the Lockean Person”
“Metaphysical Payoffs of a Relation Interpretation of the Lockean Person”

AWARDS, FELLOWSHIPS, AND GRANTS 
  • Presidential Scholar, Harvard University — 2013–2020
  • Harvard Asia Center Conference Attendance Grant, funding to present at the International Association of Tibetan Studies, Paris, France — 2019
  • Harvard Graduate Student Council Conference Grant, funding to present at the Varieties of Unity in Early Modern Philosophy Conference at the University of Groningen, Netherlands — 2019
  • Fulbright Scholar, Cultural Exchange Fulbright (Institute of International Education), dissertation research in India — 2018–2019 (declined)
  • American Council of Learned Societies Dissertation Fellowship, Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation Program in Buddhist Studies Dissertation Fellowship — 2018–2019
  • Certificate of Distinction in Teaching, Harvard University, “Early Modern Philosophy: Self and World” — 2018
  • Ezra F. Vogel Grant, Travel and Research at the Institute for Higher Buddhist Studies, Sikkim, India — Summer 2017
  • Jack C. Tang Grant, Travel and Research in China — Summer 2017 (declined)
  • Certificate of Distinction in Teaching, Harvard University, “Introduction to Early Modern Philosophy” — 2016 
  • Certificate of Distinction in Teaching, Harvard University, “Intermediate Classical Tibetan” — 2015 
  • Harvard Summer School Tuition Waiver, Harvard University, Chinese Language Study — 2014
  • Senior Thesis Book Prize from the Committee on the Study of Religion, Harvard College, highest thesis grade in concentration, summa cum laude — 2013 
  • John Harvard Scholar, top 5% of Harvard College class — 2010–2011, 2011–2012, and 2012–2013 
  • Fung Scholar, Tibetan language study and senior thesis research at Sichuan University, China; fieldwork in Amdo and Kham ethnic Tibetan regions — Summer 2012
 
SELECTED PRESENTATIONS
  • “Śrīgupta Against the Unity of Mind”
    19th Congress of the International Association of Buddhist Studies, Section on Buddhist Metaphysics and Epistemology, Seoul, South Korea — August 2020 
  • “Can a Mind have Parts? Śrīgupta on Mental Mereology,” 5th International Workshop on Madhyamaka Studies, Madhyamaka and Yogācāra: A Dialogue Between Two Main Streams of Mahāyāna Buddhist Philosophy, Ryukoku University, Kyoto, Japan — November 2019
  • “Fathers, Friends, and Foes: Locke’s Relational Account of Persons," 3rd Arctic Circle Seminar in Early Modern Philosophy, Thick Selves in Early Modern Metaphysics, Kilpisjärvi Station, University of Helsinki, Finland — August 2019
  • “The Truth about Śrīgupta’s Two Truths: Longchen Rabjampa’s ‘Lower Svātantrikas’ and the Making of a New Philosophical School,” 15th Seminar of the International Association of Tibetan Studies, Panel on Mapping Intellectual Networks of Tibetan Scholasticism, Paris, France — July 2019
  • “Somethings and Nothings: Leibniz and Śrīgupta on Being and Unity,” with Jeffrey McDonough, Varieties of Unity in Early Modern Philosophy, University of Groningen, Netherlands — April 2019
  • “No Thing isn’t Nothing: Śrīgupta’s Neither-One-Nor-Many Argument and Metaphysical Infinitism,” Panel Co-organizer: Neither-One-Nor-Many: Buddhist Philosophy of Religion at Vikramaśīla, Co-sponsored by Buddhist Philosophy and Philosophy of Religion Units, Annual Meeting of the American Academy of Religion, Denver, USA — November 2018 
  • “Epistemological Payoffs of a Relation Interpretation of the Lockean Person,” Respondent: Donald Ainslie, University of Toronto, Colloquium on Medieval and Early Modern Philosophy, Groningen Centre for Medieval and Early Modern Thought, Netherlands — July 2017  
 
TEACHING: GRADUATE AND UNDERGRADUATE
HEAD TEACHING FELLOW, HARVARD UNIVERSITY  
As Head Teaching Fellow, I was in charge of the logistics for a large class and coordinated the work of other teaching assistants. 
  • Early Modern Philosophy: Self and World, Prof. Alison Simmons — Spring 2018
 
TEACHING FELLOW, HARVARD UNIVERSITY
  • Introduction to Early Modern Philosophy, Prof. Alison Simmons — Spring 2016
  • Buddhist Philosophy Proseminar, Prof. Parimal Patil — Fall 2015
 
PRIMARY INSTRUCTOR, HARVARD UNIVERSITY
  • Elementary Classical Tibetan — Fall 2016–Spring 2017
  • Intermediate Classical Tibetan — Fall 2015–Spring 2016, Fall 2016–Spring 2017, Fall 2017

GUEST LECTURER, HARVARD UNIVERSITY
  • Graduate Seminar on British Empiricism — Spring 2019

ACADEMIC SERVICE 
Organizer, Harvard’s Department of South Asian Studies Lecture Series — 2017–2018
Organizer, Harvard Buddhist Studies Forum — 2016–2017

LEADERSHIP EXPERIENCE
Team Leader, Harvard Language Center — 2012–2018
Managed a team of 20+ student employees, responsible for hiring, scheduling, payroll, administrative duties; supported foreign language faculty and students with multimedia course materials

LANGUAGE SKILLS
Advanced Sanskrit
Advanced Classical Tibetan
Advanced Colloquial Tibetan
Basic Literary Chinese 
Basic Mandarin Chinese
French Reading Knowledge
German Reading Knowledge
Spanish Reading Knowledge
 
SELECTED GRADUATE COURSEWORK
CONTEMPORARY AND WESTERN PHILOSOPHY
Introduction to Early Modern Philosophy (Alison Simmons)
Medieval Philosophy (Jeffrey McDonough)
Advanced Topics in British Empiricism (Alison Simmons and Jeffrey McDonough)
Deductive Logic (Ned Hall)
The Rationalists (Graduate Seminar) (Jeffrey McDonough and Anat Schechtman) 
Workshop in Metaphysics and Epistemology (Alison Simmons, John Bengson) 
Metaphysics (Andrew Graham)
Beyond Dualism: Descartes and His Critics (Alison Simmons)
Epistemology (Selim Berker) [audited]
British Empiricism (Alison Simmons) [audited]
The Continental Rationalists (Jeffrey McDonough) [audited]
History of Modern Moral Philosophy (Christine Korsgaard) [audited]
Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (Samantha Matherne) [audited]
 
ASIAN PHILOSOPHY AND LANGUAGES
Buddhist Philosophy: Proseminar (Parimal Patil)
Advanced Philosophical Sanskrit: Vasubandhu’s Abhidharmakośabhāṣya, Jayanta’s Nyāyamañjarī (Alex Watson)
Advanced Philosophical Sanskrit: Śābharabhāṣya, Śālikanātha’s Prakaraṇapañcikā (Alex Watson and Taisei Shida)
Advanced Poetic Sanskrit: Haracaritacintāmaṇi, Raghuvaṃśa (Alex Watson)
Advanced Poetic Sanskrit: Mammaṭa’s Kāvyaprakāṣa (Parimal Patil)
Sanskrit Reading and Research: Ratnākaraśānti’s Antarvyāptisamarthana (Parimal Patil)
Buddhism in Three Languages (Sanskrit, Tibetan, Chinese): Vasubandhu’s Abhidharmakośabhāṣya, Candrakīrti’sMadhyamakāvatāra, Sthiramati’s Triṃśikābhāṣya (Shenghai Li) 
Nth Year Sanskrit: Vasubandhu’s Trisvabhāvanirdeśa, Dharmakīrti’s Sambandhaparīkṣā, Paṇḍita Aśoka’s Avayavinirākaraṇa (Parimal Patil) 
Nth Year Sanskrit: Abhinavagupta’s Īśvarapratyabhijñāvimarśinī, Ratnakīrti’s Santānāntaradūṣaṇa (Parimal Patil)
Dharmas, Emptiness, and Idealism: The Intellectual Career of Vasubandhu (Parimal Patil) 
Thinking Critically about Emptiness: History of Madhyamaka Philosophy in South Asia (Shenghai Li)
Readings in Tibetan Dunhuang Documents (Leonard van der Kuijp)
Readings in Bilingual Texts (Tibetan and Sanskrit): Śaṅkarasvāmin’s Nyāyapraveśa, Dignāga’s Hetucakra (Leonard van der Kuijp) 
Tibetan Religious Literature (Seminar) (Janet Gyatso)
Tibetan Readings in Madhyamaka (Leonard van der Kuijp)
Tibetan Logic and Epistemology (Leonard van der Kuijp)
Readings in the Life of the Kashmiri Scholar Śākyaśrībhadra (Leonard van der Kuijp)
Tibetan Reading and Research: Phya pa Chos kyi seng ge’s commentary on Śāntarakṣita’s Madhyamakālaṃkāra (Leonard van der Kuijp)
Indian and Tibetan Yogācāra: Buddhist Idealism, Phenomenology, and Philosophy of Mind (Jay Garfield) [audited]
 
REFERENCES 
PARIMAL G. PATIL
Professor of Religion and Indian Philosophy 
Department of Philosophy and Department of South Asian Studies
Harvard University
ppatil@fas.harvard.edu
 
LEONARD W. J. VAN DER KUIJP
Professor of Tibetan and Himalayan Studies 
Department of South Asian Studies
Harvard University
vanderk@fas.harvard.edu
 
ALISON SIMMONS
Samuel H. Wolcott Professor of Philosophy and Harvard College Professor
Department of Philosophy
Harvard University
asimmons@fas.harvard.edu
 
JEFFREY K. MCDONOUGH
Professor of Philosophy
Department of Philosophy 
Harvard University
jkmcdon@fas.harvard.edu
 
JAY L. GARFIELD
Doris Silbert Professor in the Humanities and Professor of Philosophy, Logic and Buddhist Studies, Smith College
Visiting Professor of Buddhist Philosophy, Harvard Divinity School
Professor of Philosophy, University of Melbourne
Adjunct Professor of Philosophy, Central University of Tibetan Studies
jgarfield@smith.edu

DISSERTATION ABSTRACTS 
I. Against Unity and Being: Śrīgupta’s Metaphysical Indefinitism
            It’s easy to see how certain things depend for their existence on other things: a gaggle cannot exist without geese, nor a molecule without atoms. But what would the world be like if everything depended for its existence on something else? Is an unending dependence structure even coherent? Historically, Western philosophical traditions have predominantly endorsed metaphysical foundationalist positions, yet Buddhist philosophy provides a rich source of anti-foundationalist arguments that merit broader attention. I present a reconstruction and analysis of one such anti-foundationalist argument, the “neither-one-nor-many argument,” as formulated by the c. seventh century Indian Buddhist philosopher, Śrīgupta, in his Introduction to Reality (Tattvāvatāra). I argue that Śrīgupta’s line of reasoning commits him to a form of metaphysical indefinitism, and I make a case for its internal consistency and identify its virtues. 
            As a Mādhyamika Buddhist, Śrīgupta’s central commitment is that nothing has independent being (svabhāva), that is, everything is ontologically dependent on something else. He recognizes a tight connection between ontological dependence and mereological dependence: a thing is ontologically independent only if it is mereologically simple. That’s because anything that has proper parts depends for its existence on the existence of those parts. Śrīgupta argues that nothing is ontologically independent because there are no simples. While someone like Leibniz rejects material simples only to appeal to mind-like simple substances to ground the multitude, Śrīgupta insists that the existence of any kind of simple—whether material or immaterial—is metaphysically impossible. In reconstructing Śrīgupta’s argument, I focus on (i) his subargument against material simples (an attack on atomism), as well as (ii) his subargument against mental simples, which turns on an analysis of the relation between the mind and mental content.
            But what would a world devoid of fundamentalia look like? I clarify that Madhyamaka dependence chains are indefinite rather than straightforwardly infinite inasmuch as they are potentially, mind-dependently, and structurally infinite, rather than actually, mind-independently, and quantitatively infinite. I delineate the structural properties of the Madhyamaka metaphysical dependence relation by contrasting it with the metaphysical grounding relation. Mādhyamikas like Śrīgupta are metaphysical egalitarians of a sort: in the final analysis, nothing is ontologically independent, and so, strictly speaking, there is nothing that is ontologically prior to, or more fundamental than anything else. Thus, Madhyamaka dependence relations do not honor the strict asymmetrical metaphysical priority of one relatum to the other, which is standardly characteristic of the metaphysical grounding relation. Yet, provided certain contextualist qualifications, I reveal how the metaphysical grounding relation can still serve as a useful model for understanding Madhyamaka dependence relations.
            Śrīgupta's metaphysical indefinitism makes use of (at least) three kinds of dependence relations: causal, conceptual, and mereological. I flesh out a picture of this view focusing on mereological indefinitism as a subspecies of metaphysical indefinitism. I clarify how Madhyamaka mereological indefinitism differs from contemporary “gunky” mereological models and I argue that there are, in fact, a variety of reasons to endorse this admittedly unintuitive position. I demonstrate the payoffs of the view in terms of its ontological and ideological parsimony and its capacity to honor common sensical and pragmatic concerns. I further show how Madhyamaka mereological indefinitism offers promising strategies for resolving a variety of familiar metaphysical puzzles concerning identity, colocation, composition, and persistence.
 
II. A Relation-Interpretation of the Lockean Person
          I argue that, for Locke, a person is a relation. There’s a reason that this interpretation has been overlooked. It sounds odd to us today to say that a person is a relation. But Locke does not mean the same thing by “relation” that we do. And the structure of Lockean relations has not been well understood. Many of Locke’s stock examples of relations—like friend, enemy, father, and son—appear to contemporary readers not to be relations at all, but things that stand in relations to other things. For instance, most of us take a father to stand in the relation of fatherhood to his child, without taking fathers themselves to be relations. Locke, however, claims just that: fathers are relations. A proper analysis of Lockean relations helps us see that—against the tide of past scholarship—a person for Locke is best categorized not as a substance (like a body or a soul) or as a mode (like a number or an activity), but as a relation (like a father or a friend). A relation-interpretation of the Lockean person not only makes the best sense of the text, but also yields an account of persons that delivers significant metaphysical and epistemological advantages.
            I start with an analysis of the unusual structure of Lockean relations. I then present my relation-interpretation of Lockean persons, focusing first on how the idea of a person conforms to the structure of an idea of a relation, and next explaining how to understand a person as a relation ontologically. Along the way, I shed light on a historically overlooked distinction between the Lockean self and the Lockean person, which are standardly understood as first and third personal equivalents. The conflation of the Lockean self and person has led to confusion on the part of interpreters who have sought to condemn, revise, or rehabilitate Locke’s seemingly circular account of personal identity. But for Locke, the self and the person are not strictly equivalent. It is the person—not the self—that is a diachronic forensic entity tracking moral accountability, and it is the self—not the person—that is the synchronic object of knowledge of the cogito. The person is a diachronic identity relation between past and present selves, which are its relata. 
           The metaphysics of persons has epistemic consequences. Locke famously endorses a strong form of privileged access when it comes to first personal judgments concerning one’s own personal identity. He ought not, however, to endorse infallibility. Many interpretations of Lockean personal identity, including the popular “memory theory,” commit him to infallibility. I argue that understanding the Lockean person as a relation affords an account of qualified privileged access in first personal judgments of personal identity. Lockean relations are (i) in some sense mind-dependent, yet they are also (ii) beholden to the existence of particular substances denominated by their relata, which act as their truth-makers. That persons as relations are mind-dependent accommodates the epistemic privilege of the first-person stance, and that persons as relations must answer to the existence of substances as their truth-makers provides a non-circular basis for excluding infallibility, thereby preventing false memories from constituting persons. 
           Understanding persons as relations also delivers metaphysical payoffs. I demonstrate how this metaphysically thin account of persons not only honors the non-substantialist spirit of Locke’s account of personal identity, but also sidesteps Reid’s failure of transitivity objection. That’s because on the relation-interpretation, (i) persons are transitive relations, and (ii) they are relativized to the first-person, present perspective from which one makes judgments about one’s own personhood. Moreover, I show how sameness of consciousness serves as a grounding criterion for persons without entailing circularity or resorting to a substantialist account of consciousness. A relation-interpretation, thus, yields the strongest reading of Locke’s influential account of personhood.

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