Umrao Sethi (NHC Fellow, 2022–23)

Umrao Sethi is assistant professor of philosophy at Brandeis University. She received her PhD in philosophy from the University of California, Berkeley in 2017 and spent two years as an assistant professor at the City University of New York before moving to Brandeis University. Her interests lie at the intersection of the philosophy of perception, metaphysics and early modern philosophy and her work has appeared in leading philosophy journals including Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, The Australasian Journal of Philosophy, and The Philosophical Quarterly. She has previously received a Professional Staff Congress-City University of New York Research Award as well as funding from the New Directions in the Study of Mind Project based at Cambridge University.

Sethi is currently working on a book-length project in which she argues that accommodating the full range of sensory phenomena requires us to reimagine age-old metaphysical commitments that trace all the way back to Aristotle. By developing a metaphysics that is informed by both the history of philosophy and contemporary philosophy of mind, she provides a novel account of the nature of perception, sensory delusion and the sensible world.

Selected Publications

• Sethi, Umrao. “Sensible Individuation.” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research (July 2022).
• Sethi, Umrao. “The Varieties of Instantiation.” The Journal of the American Philosophical Association 7, no. 3 (2021): 417-37.
• Sethi, Umrao. “Mind-Dependence in Berkeley and the Problem of Perception.” The Australasian Journal of Philosophy 99, no. 4 (2021): 648-68.
• Sethi, Umrao. Review of Conscious Experience: A Logical Inquiry, by Anil Gupta. Philosophical Review 130, no. 4 (2021): 609-14.
• Sethi, Umrao. “Sensible Over-Determination.” Philosophical Quarterly 70, no. 280 (2020): 588-616.