Karl H. Potter is Professor Emeritus at the University of Washington. After receiving his doctorate in the philosophy of language from Harvard in 1955, Potter went on to help spearhead the burgeoning field of comparative philosophy—serving as the first president of the Society for Asian and Comparative Philosophy and dedicating five decades (in counting), toward a philosophical examination of all facets Indian thought; including: linguistics, metaphysics, ethics, logic, epistemology, and ontology. He has written over seventy articles and reviews in various academic journals in India and the United States. From among them, "The Naturalistic Principle of Karma" (Philosophy East & West, 1964) probes the provocative and prescient question—"can karma be naturalized?" He is the author of the seminal book, Presuppositions of India's Philosophies and the General Editor of the voluminous Encyclopedia of Indian Philosophies.
In his career Potter has also served as Chairman of the South Asia Regional Council of the Association for Asian Studies and was formerly a member of its Board of Directors. He was a member of the Executive Committee of the American Institute of Indian Studies, and a member of the Council for International Exchange of Scholars fro 1983-1986. He has served as a member of the South Asia Review Panel of Fulbright Senior Scholar Awards and of the South Asia Review Committee of the Institute of International Education. He was formerly a member of the joint Advisory Committee on International Programs of the Social Science Research Council and the American Council of Learned Societies. From 1963-67 he was the Chairperson of the Philosophy Department at the University of Minnesota. At Washington he was the Chairman of the South Asia Program of the Institute for Comparative and Foreign Area Studies from 1972 to 1986, and Chairperson of the Philosophy Department from 1985 to 1988. He was a Visiting Professor at the University of Hawaii in 1975 and at Jadavpur University, Calcutta in 1981. He has taught at Carleton College, Northfield, Minn. and at the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, Minn. as well as at the University of Washington in Seattle from 1970-2003. Karl Potter received the Padma Shri award from the President of India in New Delhi on March 24, 2011.
Deen K. Chatterjee studied under Karl H. Potter and received a Ph. D. in philosophy from the University of Washington. He currently an Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Utah where he teaches classes on political philosophy, applied ethics, and the philosophy of religion and culture. Professor Chatterjee's recent and forthcoming publications include Gathering Threats: The Ethics of Preventive War (Cambridge University Press, 2010); Democracy in a Global World: Human Rights and Political Participation in the 21st Century, (Rowman and Littlefield, 2007); The Ethics of Assistance: Morality and the Distant Needy, (Cambridge University Press, 2004); and Ethics and Foreign Intervention, with Don Scheid (Cambridge University Press, 2003). Currently he is completing two monographs, one on the ethics of war and peace and the other on cosmopolitan justice. In addition, he is editing two volumes, one with Martha Nussbaum on Tagore's philosophy of education and the other on feminism and multiculturalism. His recent articles and reviews have been published in Metaphilosophy, Ethics and International Affairs, Ethics, The Journal of Ethics, Social Philosophy Today, The Good Society, and The Monist. He has contributed book chapters in several anthologies and is the author of articles and entries in the Encyclopedia of Business Ethics and Society and The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy. Professor Chatterjee is advisory editor of The Monist 86:3, editor-in-chief of the forthcoming multi-volume Encyclopedia of Global Justice, and the series editor of Studies in Global Justice . He has been a member of the American Philosophical Association's Advisory Committee on Applied Ethics (Eastern Division) and has been a two-term member of the Association's Committee on International Cooperation. He recently co-directed (with Martha Nussbaum) an international conference in Kolkata on Tagore's philosophy of education and has been the project director of four national and international conferences at the University of Utah: Student Conference on Gender, Diversity, and Identity: An International and Interdisciplinary Women's Forum (2004); Feminism, Multiculturalism, and Group Rights (2001); Ethics and National Boundaries (1998); and Violence and Non-Violence (1998).
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