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 the early roots and early-modern manifestations of Hinduism’s Vedāntic Philosophy with an emphasis on metaphysics in the Bhedābheda tradition. On the European side, I study Hans-Georg Gadamer’s distinctive reformulation of the Phenomenological tradition as a way of thinking about existence, and humanity’s creative role within it.

I am currently working on a book that explores the difference between the secular scientific notions of reality, nature and matter, and philosophical arguments that the fabric of reality is itself divine. In association with this I am editing a book called Being and Substance in Indian Philosophy: The Fabric of Reality. I am also completing a book on Gadamer’s Hermeneutic philosophy of reality called Modern Sublime.

Hindu Worldviews: Theories of Self, Ritual and Reality (Bloomsbury, 2017)

‘ ‘The view from above’: a theory of comparative philosophy’, Religious Studies 56 (2020), Special Issue 1 (Philosophy of Religions: Cross-Cultural, Multi-Religious Approaches), 32-48

‘Beautiful structures: Gadamer on beauty, love, faith, and the nature of value, blog post for Transpositions: Theology, Imagination and the Arts (the official blog of the Institute for Theology, Imagination and the Arts at the University of St Andrews)

1. ‘ “Become This Whole World”: The Phenomenology of Metaphysical Religion in Chāndogya Upaniṣad 6-8’, Religions 10(6) (2019), 368

‘ ‘Speakers of highest truth’. Philosophical plurilogues about brahman in the early Upaniṣads’, in Brian Black and Chakravarthi Ram-Prasad (eds), In Dialogue with Classical Indian Traditions (Routledge, 2019)

Categorisation in Indian Philosophy: Thinking Inside the Box (Ashgate, 2014)