Readings:

'Gandhi, the Philosopher', EPW, September 27, 2003 

'Occidentalism, the Very Idea', EPW, August 19, 2006

'Nehruvian Modernity and its Contradictions', EPW, August 1988 

'Secular Liberalism and the Moral Psychology of Identity', EPW, October 4, 1997 

'Two Concepts of Secularism', EPW, July 9, 1994

'What is a Muslim?', EPW, May 16, 1992 

'Secularism and the Very Concept of Law' in Anuradha D. Needham and Rajeshwari Sunder Rajan (eds.), The Crisis of Secularism in India, (New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2007), pp. 316-332

Akeel Bilgrami is Johnsonian Professor of Philosophy at Columbia University. Akeel Bilgrami got a first degree in English Literature from Bombay University but defected to philosophy becasue he found the former too hard. He went to Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar and there got another Bachelor's degree in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics. He has a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago, after writing a dissertation, "Meaning as Invariance," on the subject of the indeterminancy of translation and issues concerning realism and linguistic meaning. He joined the Department of Philosophy at Columbia University in 1985 after spending two years as an Assistant Professor at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

Professor Bilgrami has two relatively independent sets of intellectual interests--in the Philosophy of Mind and Language, and in issues of Political Philosophy and Moral Psychology especially as they surface in politics, history, and culture.

In the former, he has published a book in 1992 called 'Belief and Meaning' (Blackwell) and another book published in 2006 called "Self Knowledge and Resentment' (Harvard University Press). He is presently working on a book on some aspects of agency and practical reason.

In the latter, his collection of essays called "Politics and The Moral Psychology of Identity" is forthcoming from Harvard University Press. He is also contracted to publish two small books in the very near future, one called "What is a Muslim?" (Princeton University Press) and another on Gandhi's philosophy, situating Gandhi's thought in seventeenth century dissent in England and Europe and more broadly within the later Romantic tradition.

He teaches courses and seminars regularly in the department on Philosophy of Mind and Language and also in the Committee on Global Thought and Political Science on issues in Politics and Rationality as well as Religion and Politics in Global Context.

Professor Bilgrami is the Director of the Heyman Center for the Humanities at Columbia University. 

http://www.columbia.edu/cu/philosophy/fac-bios/bilgrami/faculty.html