Allison Aitken receives Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation Dissertation Fellowship in Buddhist Studies (ACLS)

Allison Aitken, PhD candidate in South Asian Studies, received a 2018 Dissertation Fellowship from the Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation Program in Buddhist Studies, administered by the American Council of Learned Societies. During her time as a 2018 Dissertation Fellow of the Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation, she will undertake research, both at Harvard and abroad in India, in support of her dissertation on the Madhyamaka philosophy of the eighth-century Indian Buddhist thinker, Śāntarakṣita. In her dissertation, “Not One, Not Many, and No Final Ground: Śāntarakṣita’s Mereological Anti-realism as Metaphysical Infinitism,” she engages in a philosophical study of the anti-essentialist neither-one-nor-many argument forwarded by Śāntarakṣita in his Ornament for the Middle Way (Madhyamakālaṃkāra), undertaking a rational reconstruction of Śāntarakṣita’s thought utilizing conceptual resources from contemporary metaphysics.