Mirja Annalena Holst

I am a philosopher specialising in analytic philosophy and Asian philosophy.

I have worked as an associate professor at Miyazaki International University (Japan), as an assistant professor at the American University in Vietnam (Vietnam), and as a part-time lecturer at Lingnan University (Hong Kong). Before moving to Asia, I was a postdoctoral research assistant at RWTH Aachen University and at the University of Hamburg, where I was also a member of the Emmy Noether research project Ontology after Quine: Fictionalism and Fundamentality. I completed my PhD in philosophy at the University of Leeds, and my Magistra Artium at the University of Hamburg, and was also a visiting student at the University of Sheffield.

My main research interests are in logic, metaphysics, and philosophy of language. My doctoral and postdoctoral research concentrated on David Lewis’s ordering semantics for incomplete descriptions and counterfactual conditionals. For the past eleven years, I have been working on Asian philosophy, especially on logic and metaphysics in Zen Buddhism. My current research project analyses the views on emptiness and contradictions in the works of the Japanese Zen master Dōgen and the modern Japanese Zen master Suzuki Shunryu, and relates them to contemporary debates on fundamentality and dialetheism in Western logic and metaphysics. I am fascinated with the places where Eastern and Western philosophy meet.