Allison E. Aitken

Allison Aitken
Assistant Professor | Columbia University
A.B., Harvard College (2013)
Ph.D., Harvard University (2020)

Research Interests
Asian Philosophy (esp. Indian and Tibetan Buddhist Philosophy)
Early Modern Philosophy (esp. Locke)

Allison Aitken joined the Philosophy 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.