Current Students Directory

Biography, Education and Training

My name is Rini and I am from Singapore. After a few years working toward a business degree, I decided to switch gears and pursue philosophy: graduating as a philosophy undergraduate at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. I was a philosophy PhD student at UCLA, where I earned an MA in philosophy, before moving to Santa Cruz. I am thrilled to continue my journey at UCSC. 

My primary areas of interest in philosophy are in ethics, practical reasoning, and philosophy of mind. I have been drawn towards the motivations behind action, what it means to be a rational agent, and how this affects the way we make decisions. For my final-year project as an undergraduate, I wrote a paper on decision-making in the context of potentially transformative experiences, like the decision to have children, and my interest in the relation between decision making and philosophy of psychology has continued to grow. 

I often like to think about foundational issues in the philosophy of mind as they might apply to my actual lived experience. Given representationalism, we only directly perceive mental representations of external objects, and not the objects themselves. Is this truth something that we can, at best, treat merely as an intellectual theory, or if internalized deeply enough, can we change the way we experience the world? Or consider concepts, which on one view are like an “overlay” we place over the world. What does it mean if the world, in itself, is non-conceptual? What does that say about the veracity of our experiences?

In general, I am passionate about what might be called a “practical” approach to philosophy, or the application of philosophy and philosophical techniques in daily life. I admire those that attempt to bring philosophy to non- philosophers, or to “raise the sanity waterline” of society at large. I would very much like to develop these abilities in myself.