12-Month Faculty Research Fellow
Nilanjan Das (Ph.D. Philosophy, MIT, 2016) is Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Toronto at Mississauga. Before coming to Toronto, he finished a Ph.D. at MIT and taught at NYU Shanghai and University College London. He works on epistemology and the history of South Asian philosophy. In epistemology, he explores connections between self-knowledge and the requirements of epistemic rationality. In the history of South Asian philosophy, he focuses on debates between Buddhists and Brahmanical philosophers about the nature of the self, knowledge, and self-knowledge. At present, he is finishing a monograph on the 12th century Indian philosopher Śrīharṣa.
Fellowship Research Project—The Absence of Evidence Principle in South Asian Philosophy
According to a popular slogan, “absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.” While the slogan makes sense in many contexts of scientific reasoning, it doesn’t explain how we are often able to successfully infer facts about absence of certain objects on the basis of our lack of evidence for those objects. In my project, I wish to examine the conditions under which absence of evidence constitutes evidence of absence. To do this, I turn to the history of South Asian philosophy where different versions of the slogan were distinguished and defended.