Swami Medhananda | Is Free Will an Illusion? The Philosophical Perspective of Sri Ramakrishna

Swami Medhananda (Ayon Maharaj) is a monk of the Ramakrishna Order and Associate Professor and Head of the Program in Philosophy at Ramakrishna Mission Vivekananda Educational and Research Institute in Belur Math, West Bengal (India). His current research focuses on Vedāntic philosophical traditions, cross-cultural philosophy of religion, cross-cultural approaches to consciousness, Indian scriptural hermeneutics, and the philosophies of Sri Ramakrishna, Swami Vivekananda, and Sri Aurobindo. He is a Section Editor for the International Journal of Hindu Studies (Springer), overseeing submissions in Hindu and Cross-Cultural Philosophy of Religion. He has recently completed a book manuscript, "Swami Vivekananda's Vedāntic Cosmopolitanism," which highlights Vivekananda's cosmopolitan engagement with Indian and Western thinkers and explores the contemporary relevance of his philosophical positions.
He is the author of two books, Infinite Paths to Infinite Reality: Sri Ramakrishna and Cross-Cultural Philosophy of Religion (Oxford University Press, 2018) and The Dialectics of Aesthetic Agency: Revaluating German Aesthetics from Kant to Adorno (Bloomsbury, 2013). He is the editor of The Bloomsbury Research Handbook of Vedānta (2020), a volume of sixteen newly commissioned chapters by a team of leading international scholars. He is also the editor of two Special Issues of the International Journal of Hindu Studies, one on "Vedāntic Theodicies" (forthcoming in Spring 2021) and one on "Swami Vivekananda as a Philosopher and Theologian" (in progress). His articles have appeared in such journals as Philosophy East and West, Journal of Indian Philosophy, Journal of Religion, Kantian Review, Journal of World Philosophies, Journal of Dharma Studies, Religions, History of European Ideas, PMLA, and Journal of the History of Ideas.
He has been invited to lecture at Princeton University, Graduate Theological Union (California), Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Presidency University (Kolkata), and the Indian Institute of Advanced Study, among other institutions. He received his PhD in 2009 from the University of California at Berkeley, where he specialized in German philosophy. He was also a Fulbright Scholar at the Institut für Philosophie, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin (2006-7) and a Visiting Student at Magdalen College, University of Oxford (2000-1).
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