Bret Davis

Bret W. Davis is Professor and Higgins Chair in Philosophy at Loyola University Maryland, where he teaches courses on Asian, Western, and cross-cultural philosophy. Prof. Davis was raised in the United States, where he attained a BA (1989) in philosophy (with minors in religion and art/art history) from Trinity University, and an MA (1996) and Ph.D. (2001) in philosophy from Vanderbilt University. He has also studied and taught for more than a year in Germany and for more than thirteen years in Japan. In Japan, he studied Buddhist thought at Otani University, completed the coursework for a second Ph.D. in the history of Japanese philosophy at Kyoto University, taught philosophy of religion, ethics, comparative thought and other courses in Japanese at various universities, and practiced Zen Buddhism at Shōkokuji, one of the main Rinzai Zen training monasteries in Kyoto. He has published numerous books and articles on East Asian philosophy and religion (esp. Zen Buddhism), on modern Japanese philosophy (esp. the Kyoto School), on Continental philosophy (esp. Heidegger, phenomenology, and hermeneutics), and on issues in cross-cultural philosophy and comparative philosophy of religion. He serves on the executive committee of several international societies and is co-editor of two book series, World Philosophies with Indiana University Press and Transcontinental Philosophy with SUNY Press, as well as of the Japanese philosophy section of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.