I am a philosopher, currently working as a Lecturer at the American University in Vietnam (AUV) in Da Nang. Before that, I have been working for a couple of semesters at Lingnan University in Hong Kong. And before that, I have been teaching at the University of Hamburg in Germany. Even before that, I have been working as a post-doctoral researcher in the Emmy Noether Project Ontology after Quine: Fictionalism and Fundamentality in Hamburg. And before that, I spent a year working as a post-doc at the University of Aachen in Germany, and another half year on a research grant in Hamburg.
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. My current research focuses on Asian philosophy, especially on metaphysics and logic in Zen Buddhism. I compare the views on emptiness and true contradictions in the works of the Vietnamese Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh and the Japanese Zen master Zenji Dogen. 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.
Mirja Annalena Holst 