This page is devoted to highlighting the broad range of philosophical work and study that takes place at Rutgers, as well as to provide access to resources that might be of interest to those with interests in African and Africana Philosophy, Buddhist Philosophy, Chinese Philosophy, Indian Philosophy, Latinx and Latin American Philosophy, Native American and Indigenous Philosophy, and other philosophical traditions and figures that have frequently been excluded from the philosophical canon.


Events and Courses at Rutgers


People at Rutgers

Edwin Bryant is a professor of Hindu Religion and Philosophy in the Department of Religion.  Professor Bryant has received numerous awards and fellowships, published eight books, and authored a number of articles on the earliest origins of the Vedic culture, yoga philosophy, and the Krishna tradition. These include a Penguin World Classics translation of the story of Krishna’s incarnation, from its traditional source the Śrīmad Bhāgavata Purāṇa. He is presently working on a translation of the Bhagavad Gītā with a commentary based on the insights of the principle traditional commentators.  

Brittney Cooper is a professor in the Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Department, and is a leading figure working on Black feminist thought.  She is the author of Beyond Respectability: The Intellectual Thought of Race Women (University of Illinois Press, May 2017) and Eloquent Rage: A Black Feminist Discovers Her Superpower (St. Martin’s, February 2018).

Derrick Darby is a member of the philosophy department, and is very interested in bringing Africana and African-American philosophers who are currently marginalized into broader view and conversation.  He recently taught a course on black radical thought, and is working on a book on that topic focusing on W. E. B. Du Bois, Marcus Garvey, Claudia Jones, Martin Luther King, Jr., Imari Obadele, and Angela Davis.   
 
Alex Guerrero is a member of the philosophy department and has research and teaching interests in African, Latin American and Latinx, and Native American and Indigenous Philosophy.  He regularly runs a number of reading groups on these areas and teaches an undergraduate course on these topics.  He has a chapter in the forthcoming Neglected Classics of Philosophy II (Oxford University Press, 2021) on the Ahnishinahbӕótjibway philosopher Wub-e-ke-niew's book, We Have the Right to Exist: A Translation of Aboriginal Indigenous Thought.  
  
Tao Jiang is a leading scholar of Mahāyāna Buddhist philosophy (Madhyamaka and Yogācāra), classical Chinese philosophy (Confucianism and Daoism) and comparative philosophy. In his book, Contexts and Dialogue: Yogācāra Buddhism and Modern Psychology on the Subliminal Mind (Hawaii, 2006), he proposes that a comparative approach to ideas needs to contextualize those ideas first in their indigenous backgrounds and then to recontextualize them by bringing them into the new comparative setting. Jiang is director of the multidisciplinary Rutgers Center for Chinese Studies. He also co-directs the Rutgers Workshop on Chinese Philosophy and co-chairs the Neo-Confucian Studies Seminar at Columbia University. He is currently the co-chair of the Buddhist Philosophy Unit under the American Academy of Religion annual meeting.  
 
Nelson Maldonado-Torres is a philosopher with appointments in Latino and Caribbean Studies and Comparative Literature.  He is a prominent person in decolonial and post-colonial theory, working on Frantz Fanon, Enrique Dussel, and Emmanuel Levinas, among other figures. He is the author of Against War: Views from the Underside of Modernity.  
 
Stephen Stich is a member of the philosophy department and has been one of the leading people in philosophy raising questions about philosophical methodology over the past 30 years, arguing that we should be careful in universalizing our 'intuitions' about cases as is so common in the method of contemporary analytic philosophy.  He has been one of the longest-standing people working on comparative and cross-cultural philosophy from an empirically informed vantage point.  He is currently one of three people supervising a large grant-funded project on The Geography of Philosophy, working with teams in Eastern Europe, Ecuador, India, Japan, Morocco, Peru, South Africa, and South Korea to do genuinely cross-cultural, comparative philosophy.   
 

Camilla Townsend is a historian of Native America, and is in particular a leading historian of the Nahua/Aztecs.  Her new book, Fifth Sun: A New History of the Aztecs, provides a distinctive perspective on pre- and post-conquest Mesoamerican peoples, and is one of the first accounts that is based on a comprehensive reading of rarely used Nahuatl-language sources.  She has written at length about the relations between the indigenous and Europeans throughout the Americas, focusing particularly on the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century writings left to us by Native American historians.