Patrick McAllister is employed as a Senior Academy Scientist at the Institute for the Cultural and Intellectual History of Asia (IKGA) of the Austrian Academy of Sciences.

His primary research interest is the development of Buddhist philosophy in India during the 9th to 11th centuries. During that period, Buddhist philosophers competed with thinkers of other religious movements to establish the Buddhist teachings as the sole path to liberation, thereby contributing to the survival and success of Buddhist institutions.

McAllister (together with Miyuki Nakasuka and Horst Lasic) is currently diplomatically and critically editing a chapter of the only complete surviving Sanskrit commentary on a foundational text of the Buddhist epistemological tradition, Dignāga’s Pramāṇasamuccaya. The chapter discusses the object of verbal awareness and presents a Buddhist theory of universals.

McAllister is also studying the influence of the Buddhist author Prajñākaragupta, who flourished between the 8th and 10th century, on Jñānaśrīmitra and Ratnakīrti, two 10th/11th century Buddhist scholars. They are linked by a specific form of ontological idealism that has remarkable similarities to Śaiva and Vedānta theories.

Moreover, McAllister is actively involved in digital humanities projects. He contributes significantly to the conceptual, methodological, and technical development of two resources: EAST, which is a tool designed to gather bibliographical and prosopographical information on the philosophical literature of South Asia and Tibet, with a focus on logic and argumentation. And SARIT, which is a growing and dynamically developing library of Indic texts, primarily in Sanskrit, that are encoded according to the TEI Guidelines.

McAllister also coordinates the focus area “Digital Asia” that cuts across all research areas at the IKGA. Its aims are to tap into the synergies of the digital efforts in individual research projects and to promote the development of innovative computational methods in the Institute’s fields of research.