About

Christian works in the fields of philosophy of mind, phenomenology, and cross-cultural philosophy, especially Indian and Buddhist philosophy in dialogue with Western (classical and contemporary) philosophy and cognitive science. He is the author of Perceiving Reality: Consciousness, Intentionality, and Cognition in Buddhist Philosophy (OUP, 2012, pbk 2015), and editor of Reasons and Empty Persons: Mind, Metaphysics, and Morality. Essays in Honor of Mark Siderits (Springer 2023). Some of his most recent work focuses on questions about the persistence of subjectivity in non-ordinary and pathological states of consciousness, mental causation, and classical and contemporary accounts of the nature and scope of self-knowledge. He is currently completing a book manuscript that situates Buddhist analyses of consciousness and cognition within contemporary debates in philosophy of mind (under contract with OUP), and is co-editing (with Ursula Renz) The Oxford Handbook of Self-knowledge.

The recipient of several fellowships, Christian was an itinerant scholar for many years. He spent four and a half years in India in the mid-1990s, pursuing studies in Sanskrit and Indian Philosophy. While in India, he was affiliated with several research institutes, including the Maha Body Society (1993-1994), the Asiatic Society of Calcutta (1995-1996), the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute (1995), De Nobili College in Pune (1994), and the Central Institute of Higher Tibetan Studies, Sarnath (1995-1996). He was a visiting scholar at Queens' College, Cambridge University in 2000, at the Institut de Civilisation Indienne in Paris in 2001, and at the Academia di Romania in Rome in 2000. Christian earned his Ph.D. degree from the Australian National University and his License and Maîtrise in philosophy from the University of Bucharest. While at ANU, he also worked on a proof of concept model for parsing Sanskrit based on the Interlingua System, a project funded by an Australian Research Council grant (2000-2001). Christian has taught at the Australian National University, the University of Sydney, the College of Charleston, and, most recently, at the University of California, Berkeley, where he is serving as Numata Visiting Professor in Buddhist Philosophy.

Christian grew up on the banks of the beautiful blue Danube in Galati, Romania, and has lived on every continent except Africa and Antarctica. He is married to his colleague, philosopher and author, Sheridan Hough.