Shad Gilbert

Description of research and teaching

Shad works in Asian philosophy and social epistemology. Leveraging the pragmatist tradition, he promotes the enrichment of epistemic frameworks by means of Sanskrit and Chinese texts of the early first millenium.

Besides doing original work in the Prajñāpāramitā Ratnaguṇasaṁcayagāthā and the Liezi Zhu 列子注, Shad advances global philosophy by employing the literature of the historic Indo-Sinitic and Greco-Christian convergences to enrich the epistemic protocols such as codes and guidelines by which society addresses modern challenges like social fragmentation, resource allocation, and sustainability.

A full-time researcher supervised by pragmatist scholar Sami Pihlström and Chinese philosophy specialist Kirill Thompson and further advised by Jan Westerhoff, Terhi Utriainen, and Paavo Pylkkänen, Shad spent 15 years in Mainland China, Taiwan, India, and Nepal, studying languages and earning a second master’s degree focused on Asian philosophy. His work in global philosophy began with a ThM from Dallas Theological Seminary in his home country, the United States.

Research interests

Areas of Specialization
social epistemology, Pragmatism, Chinese philosophy, Mahāyāna Buddhist philosophy, the convergence literature, epistemic frameworks

Areas of Competence
Indian philosophy, Chinese Buddhism, Classical and Buddhist Hybrid Sanskrit, Classical and modern Chinese, comparative philosophy, philosophy of religion, philosophy of belief, hermeneutics, global metaphysics, conceptual engineering, those who contributed to the thought of C. I. Lewis (Kant, Royce, Peirce, James, Dewey) and those to whose thought he contributed (Quine, Sellars, Goodman, Chisholm, Putnam, Davidson)

Areas of Interest
philosophy of science, perceptual science, the Critique of Pure Reason, Plato in Greek Father Clement's Stromata, Classical and Koine Greek, the recitation of Mahāyāna verse