Akeel Bilgrami b. 1950

Akeel Bilgrami is an Indian-American philosopher, Sidney Morgenbesser Professor of Philosophy at Columbia University, and one of the leading contemporary analytic philosophers of mind, language, and political philosophy. Belief and Meaning and Self-Knowledge and Resentment defended an externalist account of mental content together with a strong thesis of first-person authority over one's own beliefs, while Secularism, Identity, and Enchantment offered a sustained reflection on the political and intellectual conditions of secularism in a postcolonial world. His many essays on Gandhi and on the philosophical legacy of the Indian independence movement have shaped contemporary postcolonial political philosophy.

Akeel Bilgrami was born in Hyderabad, India, in 1950, the son of a leading Indian Communist intellectual. He took his bachelor's at Elphinstone College, Bombay, in 1968, went up to Keble College, Oxford, as a Rhodes Scholar, and completed his doctorate at the University of Chicago in 1983 under Donald Davidson and Robert Brandom. He has taught at the University of Michigan and from 1985 at Columbia University, where he is Sidney Morgenbesser Professor of Philosophy and a founding director of the South Asian Institute and the Heyman Center for the Humanities.

His books are Belief and Meaning (1992), Self-Knowledge and Resentment (2006), Secularism, Identity, and Enchantment (2014), and a long series of essays on Gandhi, Marx, identity politics, and the philosophy of value gathered in the recent Gandhi the Philosopher.

Bilgrami combines a Davidsonian philosophy of language with a Marxian and Gandhian political ethics: meaning and belief are constitutively first-personal and normative; modern Western secularism, with its disenchantment of the natural world, is a politically consequential metaphysical commitment rather than a neutral framework; and identity is a more elusive and dynamic category than the categories of contemporary identity politics suggest. He is among the most widely read Indian philosophers in the Anglophone academy.