Agnieszka Rostalska

Agnieszka Rostalska is FWO Senior Post-doctoral researcher at the Faculty of Arts and Philosophy of Ghent University. She specializes in Asian, mainly Indian philosophy, contributing to cross-cultural and comparative research. Her current research project "Political Authority and Social Justice: A Philosophical Study of Arthasastra" concerns the socio-political philosophy of ancient India with a focus on gender and environmental issues. In 2022 she was a co-PI in the project "Cross-cultural Conceptions of the Self: South Asia, Africa, and East Asia" awarded by the University of Birmingham's Global Philosophy of Religion Project supported by the John Templeton Foundation. In 2019-2020 she was appointed as a Lecturer for Theoretical and Comparative Philosophy at the Institute for Philosophy at Leiden University and before that she was a Gonda Fellowship recipient at the International Institute of Asian Studies of Leiden University. Her other ongoing cross-cultural research: ‘Indian Realism from a Contemporary Perspective’ tackles the problems of Epistemic Authority as presented in Nyāya philosophical tradition with references to contemporary Western philosophy, i.e. epistemology of testimony and virtue epistemology. The research centres around the concept of a ‘reliable speaker’ (āpta) as developed by Nyāya philosophers of the classical period. Her PhD thesis was a study of the concept of causation in the philosophy of Nyāya-Vaiśeṣika philosophy. Other philosophical interests include Indian materialistic philosophy (the concept of own-nature, svabhāva), Buddhist philosopher Dharmakīrti (the logic of debate, vādanyāya, and points of defeat, nigrahasthāna) and the Jain ethical principle of non-harmfulness (ahiṃsā).