Jessica Frazier

I teach students at Trinity and in the Faculty of Theology and Religion about religion around the world (for the Religion & Religions paper, and for the Hinduism courses) and in theoretical debates (for the Nature of Religion and Feminist Approaches to Religion papers). This means asking why Eliade thought all humans crave the ‘sacred’, why Freud thought religion was infantile, whether atheism is really a new kind of religion, and other questions.

I also teach on the MSt in the Study of Religions and supervise graduate students in Phenomenology, Global Philosophy, and Hinduism.

My past publications have explored approaches to reality, human life, and value; I do this with reference to both Indian Philosophy and the European Phenomenological tradition.

On the Indian side, my research focuses on three themes: ideas of a unity of reality (in Hinduism’s Vedāntic Philosophy with an emphasis on metaphysics in the Bhedābheda tradition), ideas of a wider range of possibilities for the Self, than we usually explore (focusing on classical Indian conceptions of mind and body), and ideas of Goodness as something context-dependent - yet real and binding on our own existence. On the European side, I study Hans-Georg Gadamer’s distinctive reformulation of the Phenomenological tradition as a vibrant way of thinking about existence, and humanity’s creative role within it - but a way that also eludes some core criticisms of modern philosophy.

I am currently preparing two books, one on Gadamer's total philosophy, called 'Gadamer's Modern Sublime', and another on unified ontologies of reality in Indian philosophy, called 'The Roots of Reality'.

Gadamer's Modern Sublime: Truth, Beauty and Globalism. Palgrave Macmillan, forthcoming.

‘Philosophies of Being I:  Pluralism, nihilism and monism’, Philosophy Compass 19.11, 2024.

‘Against Infinite Nothingness: Arguments for Foundationalism against Madhyamaka Nihilism’, Neue Zeitschrift fur Systematische Theologie and Religionsphilosophie, 2024.

‘What Kind of ‘God’ do Hindu Arguments for the Divine Show? Five novel divine attributes of Brahman’, Sophia: International Journal of Philosophy and Traditions, 2024.

‘Omnipresence as Ultimate Ground: Power and pervasion in Śrīnivāsa’s medieval Indian philosophy’, In: The Oxford Handbook of Omnipresence. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Anna Marmodoro Ben Page, Damiano Migliorini eds. pp. 440-461.