Prof. Purushottama Bilimoria teaches philosophy at the University of San Francisco. He is also a principal fellow at the University of Melbourne and the principal editor-in-chief of the Sophia journal and the monograph series, Sophia Studies in Cross-cultural Philosophy of Traditions and Cultures. Formerly, he was a distinguished professor of law and global ethics at O.P. Jindal Global University, India. He specializes in Indian and cross-cultural philosophy, global critical philosophies of religion, Indian constitutional and personal law, cross-cultural civil rights discourse, and diaspora studies. An elected member of the European Academy of Sciences and Arts, Prof. Bilimoria is the recipient of several awards and research grants, including from the United States-India Educational Foundation (USIEF), John Templeton Foundation, the Indian Council for Philosophical Research, Harvard Divinity School, and Emory University’s Institute for the Liberal Arts. His recent publications include: History of Indian Philosophy (Routledge, 2019); Contemplative Studies and Hinduism (with Rita D. Sherma, Routledge, 2021); The Routledge Companion to Indian Ethics: Women, Justice, Bioethics and Ecology (with Amy Rayner, 2024); Mind, Body and Self (with Jaysankar Lal Shaw, Anand Vaidya, and Michael Hemmingsen, Springer, 2024); and Engaging Philosophies of Religion: Thinking Across Boundaries (with Gereon Kopf and Nathan Loewen, Bloomsbury, 2025). Currently, he is writing an entry article on Hindu ethics for the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy and also working on early Indian liberalism.
Prof. Bilimoria’s Fulbright-Nehru project is building on his extensive work on the articulation of liberalism by three great stalwarts of Indian liberalism in early twentieth-century India – Gopal Krishna Gokhale and his disciples, V.S. Srinivasa Sastri and Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi. It is investigating the political and philosophical horizon of the nationalist trajectory, through to India’s Independence and its aftermath in the late twentieth century. The project is also focusing on a decisive reconstruction of the labors of Indian liberals toward constitutionalism, freedom, social reforms, duties, rights, and reformulation of a distinct vision of liberalism, in contrast to Western liberal theories, particularly those bequeathed by colonial masters, philosophers, and the Indian elite.