Akeel Bilgrami

Sidney Morgenbesser Professor of Philosophy

Email: ab41@columbia.edu

Secularism; South Asia; Philosophy of Mind; Philosophy of Language; Political Philosophy and Moral Philosophy; Moral Psychology

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). He is presently working on a book 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.

His book Secularism, Identity, and Enchantment was published by Harvard University Press in 2014.  He is contracted to publish two small books in the very near future, one called What is a Muslim? (Princeton University Press) and another on Gandhi's philosophy. He is also the editor of the books Democratic Culture (2011), Who’s Afraid of Academic Freedom? – with Jonathan Cole (2014), Marx, Gandhi, and Modernity (2014), and Beyond the Secular West (2016).