Dr Sonam Thakchoe Acharya CIHTS., PhD Utas.
Lecturer in Buddhist Philosophy, Ethics and Nonviolence
School of Philosophy, University of Tasmania, Australia
E-mail: sonam.thakchoe@utas.edu.au

Dr Sonam Thakchoe is a former student of the Central Institute of Higher Tibetan Studiess (CIHTS). After nine-intensive years of training in the History of Indo-Tibetan Buddhist Philosophy, he was awarded Shastri and Acharya Degrees along with Gold Medal recognition. He obtained his PhD from the University of Tasmania, and is currently lecturing on Buddhist Philosophy, Ethics and Philosophy of Nonviolence. Dr Thakchoe is one of the coordinators of the Dialogue Project--one of the School of Philosophy's many community-outreach projects promoting philosophical exchange in the areas of world's religions, faiths and communities of different backgrounds. He is also involved in School of Philosophy's (University of Tasmania) India Exchange Program with the CIHTS as a coordinator and a teaching staff. As a visiting scholar at the CIHTS, one of his primary tasks is to develop WebCT based Distance Education Programs, internationally accessible, in the areas of Indo-Tibetan Buddhist philosophy. This will be undertaken in collaboration with the University of Tasmania's School of Philosophy. As part of his ecumenical works, with the aims of promoting self-empowering techniques and furnishing the personal well-being among the prison inmates, he conducts meditation classes in the Risdon Correctional Centre. He offers similar meditation classes open for the general public.

Professor Jay Garfield
Doris Silbert Professor in the Humanities and Professor of Philosophy, Smith College, Northampton, M.A, USA
E-mail: jgarfield@smith.edu

Jay Garfield teaches and pursues research in the philosophy of mind, foundations of cognitive science, logic, philosophy of language, Buddhist philosophy, cross-cultural hermeneutics, theoretical and applied ethics and epistemology.

Jay is also is director of the Five College Tibetan Studies in India Program, and most January's he brings groups of students to CIHTS to study Buddhist philosophy.

Jay's most recent book is Empty Words: Buddhist Philosophy and Cross-Cultural Interpretation (Oxford University Press 2002). He and the ven Geshe Ngawang Samten are currently translating the Fourteenth-Fifteenth Century Tibetan Philosopher Tsong Khapa's commentary on Nagarjuna's Mulamadhyamakakarika (Ocean of Reasoning). Jay is also working on projects on the development of the theory of mind in children with particular attention to the role of pretence in that process; the impact of teaching philosophy in primary schools on the development of citizenship values, the law of noncontradiction; and the history of Buddhist idealism in India and Tibet (especially the impact of Sthiramati). He is co-directing, with Peter Gregory, Jill Ker Conway Professor of Religion and Buddhist Studies, a year-long Kahn Institute , Trans-Buddhism: Transmission, Translation and Transformation investigating the interaction of Buddhist societies with the West.

Dr Koji Tanaka BIT Griff., BA Qld., PhD Qld.
Postdoctral Research/Teaching Fellow at Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia
E-mail: ktanaka@scmp.mq.edu.au

Koji Tanaka's research interests include logic, philosophy of logic, metaphysics, philosophy of language, Asian philosophies and comparative philosophy. His current projects are 'Logical Monism' and 'Comparative Study of Buddhist Logic'. The first project is aimed to develop and defend a monist account of logic (i.e., only one logic) against a pluralist account of logic (i.e., more than one logic). In the second project, he investigates and sheds a comparative light on the Buddhist philosophy of logic.