About
I am a scholar of the history of Philosophy, specializing in the Buddhist and Brahmanical philosophical traditions of pre-modern India and working with textual sources in Sanskrit and Tibetan. I am currently an associate professor in the Department of South and East Asian Studies at Tel Aviv University, where I also teach in the Philosophy Department.
My research is driven by an interest in the Buddhist philosophical understanding of the role and function of language and meaning, and in related issues in philosophy of language and mind, hermeneutics, and the history and philosophy of emotions.
My publications include A Buddhist Yogācāra Theory of Metaphor (Oxford University Press, 2018), winner of the Toshihide Numata Book Award in Buddhist Studies; Emotions in Classical Indian Philosophy (Bloomsbury, 2021), co-edited with Maria Heim and Ram-Prasad Chakravarthi; and Reading Aśvaghoṣa Across Boundaries (Journal of Indian Philosophy, 2019), a special issue dedicated to the works of the Buddhist poet and thinker Aśvaghoṣa.
I was a visiting research fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin. I received the Marie Curie Grant of the European Commission. And recently, I was the recipient of Tel Aviv University’s Kadar Award for Outstanding Research. My current collaborative work includes an ongoing research project in the digital humanities together with CERAS, Ruhr-Universität Bochum, on the inter-relation of Buddhist texts and images; and I am a co-chair (alongside Nancy Lin, Institute of Buddhist Studies, Berkeley) of “Language, Poiesis, and Buddhist Experiments with the Possible,” a five-year seminar (2022-2026) at the annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion (AAR).
Currently, I am working on a book on the works of the Buddhist poet and philosopher Aśvaghoṣa, looking at his understanding of experience and the emotions. I am also continuing my work on Buddhist notions of non-conceptual content and their possible contribution to contemporary philosophical debates on this topic, and on No-self ethics and political activism in wartime.
Here are a symposium on my book on metaphor at the University of California, Berkeley, a university of Oxford podcast and an ensuing discussion on Oxford Public Philosophy, a short video on metaphor and the politics of Language for the Kadar Award, a short interview for CERES, Ruhr-Universität Bochum, and a longer interview on Emptiness and the Madhyamaka School (in Hebrew).