This project in alternative secular epistemologies is rooted in several months of intensive research and writing completed as a Mind & Life visiting scholar in Amherst in 2015, as well as intellectual encounters as a presenter at ISCS 2014 and research fellow at MLSRI 2015. William Rubel is a current PhD candidate at the University of British Columbia, writing on science, sensation, and the history of feeling in romantic poetry. After receiving a BA, summa cum laude, from Columbia University, he completed a master’s thesis on embodied mind, drawing on contemplative neuroscience (Varela, Damasio, Thompson, Davidson). His interests include process philosophy, political ecology, science studies, haptic aesthetics, nonwestern epistemologies, and ecologies of affect. He is excited to build bridges between speculative metaphysics and buddhist epistemology with Gen. Lobsang Nor- bu Shastri at the Central University of Tibetan Studies later this year.
