A student contacted me with the following query:
I recently finished an MA in philosophy at the University of New mexico, USA. […] I’m writing you because it has been difficult to find a place where I can pursue the project I’m most interested in. I would like to develop scientific and philosophical methods for evaluating the experiential claims made in the meditative traditions of India, and apply whatever data emerges to philosophy of mind/consciousness studies. Do you have any suggestions about where such a project might be done?
When I asked for further details, he added:
I studied Vedānta, Mīmāṃsā, and the Indian debates about consciousness and self, with John Taber, and I studied Nāgārjuna with Richard Hayes. My MA research was on representationalist theories of consciousness and how they do not seem to be able to account for purportedly contentless experiences such asamprajñāta samādhi. I have already started on several facets of the project I suggested in my first message. For instance, I have a paper briefly sketching the project coming out in the Fall APA Newsletter on Asian and Asian American Philosophy, a co-authored paper in the revise and resubmit phase with the Journal of Consciousness Studies, using phenomenological reports of specific meditative experiences to illuminate a poorly understood aspect of Kurt Gödel’s proof of his Incompleteness Theorem(s), a co-authored paper in development on third-person scientific approaches to meditation research for The Oxford Handbook on Meditation, and a co-edited book on objectless experience under contract with the publisher Imprint Academic.
Financial support would be a must, although moving to some areas would be easier than others.
Do readers have useful suggestions? As I see it, the student would need both financial and research support (it would not make much sense to work on his own on such a challenging project).
In North America, two scholars who might be well-suited to supervise a Ph.D. dissertation on Indian philosophy/neurophenomenology/contemplative studies would be John Dunne (https://centerhealthyminds.org/about/people/john-dunne) and Evan Thompson (http://philosophy.ubc.ca/persons/evan-thompson/). Dunne is a very fine scholar of Indian Buddhism who holds a joint appointment in the Dept. of Asian Languages and Cultures and the Center for Healthy Minds at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Thompson is in the Philosophy Dept. at the University of British Columbia.
But I’d imagine this student from UNM was already familiar with the work of these two philosophers, given his interests and background. Perhaps he was asking you for scholars he might work with in Europe or Asia? I don’t have sufficient knowledge to comment on what might be going on outside of N. America.