Christian Coseru

Christian Coseru

Christian Coseru is an associate professor of philosophy in the Department of Philosophy at the College of Charleston. He works in the fields of philosophy of mind, Phenomenology, and cross-cultural philosophy, especially Indian and Buddhist philosophy in dialogue with Western philosophy and cognitive science. He has recently published a book, Perceiving Reality: Consciousness, Intentionality, and Cognition in Buddhist Philosophy (OUP, 2012) that develops a view of Buddhist epistemology, in the tradition of Dignaga and Dharmakirti, as continuous with the phenomenological methods and insights of Husserl and Merleau-Ponty, as well as with naturalistic approaches to epistemology and philosophy of mind. In 2012 he co-directed (with Jay Garfield and Evan Thompson) an NEH Summer Institute exploring the convergence of analytic, phenomenological, and Buddhist perspectives in the investigation of consciousness. He is currently completing a book manuscript on the intersections between perceptual and affective consciousness, tentatively entitled Sense, Self-Awareness, and Subjectivity.

Before joining the Philosophy Department at the College of Charleston, he taught in the Centre for Asian Societies and Histories at the Australian National University. He received his Ph.D. from the Australian National University in 2005; He also holds a B.A. and M.A. in philosophy from the University of Bucharest. While at ANU, he also worked on a proof of concept model for parsing Sanskrit based on the Interlingua System (the project was funded by an ARC grant). He has and continues to travel extensively for research. He spent four and a half years in India in the mid 1990s pursuing studies in Sanskrit and Indian Philosophy. While in India, he was affiliated with several research institutes, including the Asiatic Society in Calcutta (1995-1996), the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute and De Nobili College in Pune (1993), and the Central Institute of Higher Tibetan Studies, Sarnath, Varanasi (1995-1997). He was a visiting scholar at Queens' College, Cambridge University in 2000, and at the Institut de Civilisation Indienne, Paris in 2001. (Adapted from Source Nov 25,, 2024)