Ian Nicolay

Adjunct Lecturer

Currently teaching online
ian.nicolay@stonybrook.edu

Biography:

Ian Nicolay is a PhD candidate in the Philosophy Department at the University of Hawai’i, Mānoa. As an undergraduate at Texas Christian University (BA 2013), his studies focused on philosophy, religion, and history. This led him to pursue graduate studies in Asian and especially Indian thought at UH Mānoa, beginning as a master’s student in 2013. After working for two years as a research assistant to Arindam Chakrabarti, Ian then taught numerous introductory courses in logic and philosophy as a TA instructor in the philosophy department at UH Mānoa. Ian’s research specializations include Indian philosophy, comparative philosophy, philosophy of mind, and epistemology. His dissertation is a philosophical study of imagination in comparative perspective. Within Indian philosophy, he focuses on the history of logical, epistemological, and psychological debates that raged between Brahminical, Buddhist, and Jaina philosophers mainly during the period from the second through the twelfth century CE. His work typically approaches these debates from the NyāyaVaiśeṣika perspective, and focuses most narrowly on the concept of kalpanā (imagination) in classical Indian philosophy. His studies of Indian philosophy have also involved extensive engagement with Sanskrit language and literature, as well as Indian society and culture more broadly.