Mirja Annalena Holst

Welcome! I am a philosopher working as an associate professor in philosophy at Miyazaki International University (MIU) in the South of Japan. Before that, I have been working as an assistant professor in philosophy at the American University in Vietnam and as a part-time lecturer in philosophy at Lingnan University in Hong Kong. Before coming to Asia, I have been working as a post-doctoral research assistant both at the University of Aachen and at the University of Hamburg, where I have also been part of the Emmy Noether research project Ontology after Quine: Fictionalism and Fundamentality.

I completed my PhD in philosophy at the University of Leeds, under the supervision of Prof Robbie Williams and Prof John Divers and my Magister Artium at the University of Hamburg, under the supervision of Prof Wolfgang Künne. I have also spent some time as a visiting student at the University of Sheffield.

My main research interests are in philosophical logic, philosophy of language, and metaphysics. My doctoral thesis examines David Lewis’s short sketch of an ordering semantics for incomplete descriptions and develops a general semantic theory for definite descriptions on its basis. In subsequent research, I defended a general form of a Lewisian approach to incomplete descriptions and counterfactuals. And for the past ten years, I have been researching Asian philosophy. My current research focuses on metaphysics and logic in Zen Buddhism. I examine the views on emptiness and true contradictions in the works of the Vietnamese Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh. The topic of emptiness relates to recent debates on fundamentality in Western metaphysics and the topic of true contradictions relates to contemporary debates on dialetheism in Western logic. I am fascinated with the places where Eastern and Western philosophy meet.