WISDOM is the last of the three concepts under examination in the Geography of Philosophy Project (GPP). There is a substantial amount of work on how to measure wisdom, improve wise choices, cultivate wisdom as a trait, and the consequences of wisdom for one’s life, but there is much less empirical, including ethnographic, work on the concept of wisdom in linguistics, psychology, and experimental philosophy. A fortiori, there is little cross-cultural work on the concept of wisdom. GPP advisor Igor Grossman has been a leader in the psychological research on wisdom itself (as opposed to the concept of wisdom), and we will benefit from his expertise and collaboration. There is…
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Understanding: Open Questions
UNDERSTANDING is the second of the three concepts under examination in the Geography of Philosophy Project (GPP). The scholarship on the concept of understanding in linguistics, psychology, and experimental philosophy is limited (although growing). Daniel Wilkenfeld and Tania Lombrozo have however done some innovative empirical work on the lay concept of understanding in an American context, and some of our work will follow in their footsteps. (For recent philosophical work, see Wilkenfeld, Khalifa, Grimm). In this blog post, I review some of the past results and open questions we intend to examine in the coming months. “Understanding” and its translations To my knowledge, it is unknown whether “understanding” has natural…
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Introduction to PI Edouard Machery
I am one of the three PIs of the Geography of Philosophy Project (GPP). In this post, I introduce myself; my co-PIs and the team leaders and postdoctoral fellows will do the same in the coming weeks and months. I am a Distinguished Professor in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Pittsburgh, the Director of the Center for Philosophy of Science at the University of Pittsburgh, and a member of the Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition (University of Pittsburgh-Carnegie Mellon University). I obtained my PhD from the Université de Paris Sorbonne in 2004, and I have been at Pitt since 2004. My research…
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Welcome to the Go Philosophy, the Blog for the Geography of Philosophy Project
In this first blog post, I’d like to describe the Geography of Philosophy Project (GPP). The Project is funded by the John Templeton Foundation. The three lead investigators are myself (Edouard Machery, Pitt, History and Philosophy of Science), Steve Stich (Rutgers, UCLA), and Clark Barrett (UCLA, Anthropology). Currently, 8 teams are collaborating with us in the following country: Japan, Korea, India, Slovakia, Morocco, South Africa, Peru, and Ecuador. (We are in the process of adding a team in China.) You can learn about the team leaders for each of these teams on our website’s page. Postdoctoral fellows are also involved at each of these sites (learn more about them on…
