Saurabh Todariya


Assistant Professor
Ph.D (Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi)
Research Areas: Phenomenology; Hermeneutics; Kant; Philosophy of Mind; Methodology of Social Sciences; Poststructuralism
Email: saurabh.todariya@iiit.ac.in

A philosopher by training with a deep-rooted interest in the mysteries of mind and consciousness. My primary research interests are the embodied phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty, Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger, as well as the transcendental philosophy of Immanuel Kant. I am also interested in exploring the implications of embodied phenomenology for understanding the philosophical debates in the domains of Philosophy of Mind, Cognitive Science and Artificial Intelligence.

I pursued my postgraduate and doctoral studies at the Centre for Philosophy at Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU). My Ph.D. research focused on a phenomenological analysis of time and consciousness, viewed through the framework of Heideggerian phenomenology. I also received the UGC-JRF during my doctoral research and qualified for the post-doctoral fellowship from the ICPR (Indian Council of Philosophical Research).

After teaching briefly at Delhi University, I worked as a post-doctoral scholar at the National Institute of Advanced Studies (IISc Campus, Bangalore), where I further explored the role of embodiment in structuring our experience of the world. I also taught various philosophy courses at the PhD level on the intersections of phenomenology and the social sciences. Currently, I am continuing as an adjunct faculty member at NIAS and collaborating on research and book projects. Before joining IIIT-Hyderabad, I worked as an assistant professor in the department of liberal arts at SRM-AP University, Amravati and Bennett University, Greater Noida, where I taught courses in philosophy and designed the curriculum.

At present, I am working on two book projects. The first is the edited volume on multidisciplinary perspectives on artificial intelligence and machine learning to be published by Springer-Nature, and the second is also an edited volume on ageing and well-being from a phenomenological and psychoanalytical perspective to be published by Routledge.

Select Publications

  • [Book] Menon, S. Todariya, S, Agerwala, T. A. (Eds.) AI, Consciousness and the New Humanism: Fundamental Reflections on Minds and Machines. Singapore. Springer. 2024.
  • [Chapter] Todariya, S. (2024). The World as Affordances: Phenomenology and Embeddedness in Heidegger and AI. In: Menon, S., Todariya, S., Agerwala, T. (eds) AI, Consciousness and The New Humanism. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-97-0503-0_16
  • [Article] Todariya, Saurabh (2023). Emotions and Mahabharata: A Phenomenological Study of Yudhisthira’s Grief in Santi Parva. JICPR-Springer. Vol 41. 93-102, https://doi.org/10.1007/s40961-023-00320-1
  • [Article] Aggarwal, N., Todariya, S. & Trehan, K. Embodiment and Disorientation: A Phenomenological Analysis of Work from Home During COVID-19. Hum Stud (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10746-023-09694-2
  • [Article] Todariya, S., Rajaraman, S. & Menon, S. Aesthetic Delight and Beauty: A Comparison of Kant’s Aesthetics and Abhinavagupta’s Theory of Rasa. DHARM 5, 51–62 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s42240-022-00119-4
  • [Article] Todariya, Saurabh (2021). Theory and the Possibility of ‘Dalit Studies’. Economic and Political Weekly (2021) Vol. LVI NO 7: 61-63.
  • [Article] Todariya, Saurabh (2020). Synthesis and Transcendental Ego: A Comparison of Kant and Husserl. Journal of Indian Council of Philosophical Research. Springer 37:265–277.
  • [Article] Todariya, Saurabh (2018). The Problem of Lived Experience in The Cracked Mirror. Journal of Indian Council of Philosophical Research. Springer. 35:305–314.
  • [Article] Todariya, Saurabh (2016). Authentic Historicality and National Socialism in Being and Time. Kritike.10: 236-54.

Projects

  • Principal Investigator for two years project titled, ‘Embodiment and Transcendence in Kashmiri Shaivism: A Phenomenological Investigation of Vijana Bhairav Tantra’ funded by Indian Council of Philosophical Research (ICPR). The project aims at the comparative and methodological comparison between the Marleau-Ponty’s embodied phenomenology and the embodied practices mentioned in the text of Vijana Bhairav tantra. 2023
  • Co-I for two years project titled, ‘Philosophy of Health and the Healing self’ funded by ICPR, New Delhi. The project is focused on the philosophical analysis of health and its implications in the healing practices. Co-Investigators are Prof. Sangeetha Menon (NIAS, Bangalore) and Prof. Srivi Kalyan (Srishti-Manipal, Bangalore). 2023
  • Principal Investigator for the three years project titled, ‘Narrativity, Care and Well-being: A Phenomenological Investigation on Health and Illness in the Hospice Care’ funded by IIIT-H Faculty seed grant. The project aims to explore the experiential and existential dimension of the illness and the role played by story-telling in experiencing the health and subjective well-being esp. in the context of terminally ill cancer patients.

Research Supervision Interests

I am also interested in exploring the philosophy of health from a phenomenological point of view. What does it mean to fall ill from the first-person point of view? There are many aspects of illness which cannot be captured by the current scientific-objective study of illness and therefore require phenomenological methodology to explore. I am keen to explore the role of narratives as meaning-making mechanism in the cases of terminal illness.

I organised an international symposium on ‘Humanizing Medical Practices’ in collaboration with the Consciousness Studies Programme at NIAS last year, where we had many interesting sessions on the phenomenology of illness. Currently, we are planning to publish an edited volume on medical humanities.

I am also interested in exploring the role of embodied cognition in artificial intelligence from the phenomenological perspective.