Akeel Bilgrami

Sidney Morgenbesser Professor of Philosophy, Columbia University

Akeel Bilgrami got a B.A in English Literature from Elphinstone College, Bombay University and went to Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar where he read Philosophy, Politics, and Economics. He has a Ph.D in Philosophy from the University of Chicago. He is the Sidney Morgenbesser Professor of Philosophy at Columbia University, where he is also a Professor on the Committee on Global Thought. He has been the Director of the Heyman Centre for the Humanities as well as the South Asian Institute at Columbia. His publications include the books Belief and Meaning (1992), Self-Knowledge and Resentment (2006), and Secularism, Identity and Enchantment (2014). He is due to publish two in the near future: What is a Muslim? and Gandhi’s Integrity. His long-term future work is on the relations between agency, value, and practical reason.

Participant In:

The Changing Nature of Free Will

Saturday, April 25, 2015
2:30-4:30 pm

Past Event

Central to Eastern and Western philosophical and theological traditions, the notion of free will, once confined to discussions of human agency, can find application in understanding a broader set of phenomena. How are advances in genetics and neuroscience influencing our concept of voluntary, individual choice, and what are the implications for jurisprudence? How does the indeterminacy… read more »

Living in the Anthropocene

2:30pm on Saturday, April 27th, 2019

Past Event

What underlying conceptual questions prompted this new characterization of our planet’s present era? What does this imply for the distinctions we have become accustomed to: between human subjects (however varied) and the non-human realm, between nature and artifice, between agency and objectivity? These conceptual questions are not simply academic; they are asked with a view… read more »