Abstract
Akeel Bilgrami will comment briefly on his own intellectual biography and his current philosophical preoccupations, with a view to offering some reflections on the nature of inquiry.
Bio
Akeel Bilgrami got a first degree in English Literature from Bombay University but defected to philosophy because he found the former too hard. He went to Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar and there got another Bachelor's degree in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics.
Professor Bilgrami has two relatively independent sets of intellectual interests--in the Philosophy of Mind and Language, and in Political Philosophy and Moral Psychology especially as they surface in politics, political economy, history, and culture.
In the former, he has published a book in 1992 called Belief and Meaning (Blackwell) and another book published in 2006 called Self Knowledge and Resentment (Harvard University Press)., while in the latter, Secularism, Identity, and Enchantment was published by Harvard University Press in 2014 and his book Capital, Culture, and the Commons was published by Permanent Black and by Juxta Press. in 2022. His book Gandhi, The Philosopher will be out in 2024. His current work is on the relations between value, agency, and practical reason.
Professor Bilgrami was the Chairman of the Philosophy Department from 1994-98, the Director of the Heyman Center for the Humanities at Columbia University from 2004-2011, and the Director of the South Asian Institute from 2013-2016. He is an executive editor and the President of the Board of Trustees of The Journal of Philosophy.