Assistant Professor
South Asian Philosophy; History of Metaphysics
A.B., Harvard College (2013) Ph.D., Harvard University (2020)
Allison Aitken joined the department in 2021. Her research centers on non-standard theories of relations and dependence structures in the history of metaphysics, both South Asian as well as early modern European. She is currently working on two projects: the first is a defense of the Madhyamaka Buddhist ontological dependence structure understood as a kind of metaphysical indefinitism; the second is an interpretation of the Lockean person as a relation. Before coming to Columbia, Professor Aitken was a Bersoff Faculty Fellow in the Department of Philosophy at New York University.