The three PIs of the Geography of Philosophy Project include two philosophers and an anthropologist; I’m the anthropologist. My work has long engaged with philosophical questions concerning the nature of human thinking and its evolutionary, cultural, developmental, and linguistic dimensions. In my recent book The Shape of Thought, I pondered the question of why our thoughts take the specific forms and contents that they do, and how those forms and contents relate to the reasons the thoughts came to be. These reasons stretch from the evolutionary long-term (e.g., the fact that our minds are representational and the fact that we as humans are oriented towards and influenced by the social) to the more proximate cultural, developmental, and experiential short-term (e.g., our ability to represent novel concepts provided by our local languages and our drives to fill our minds with certain contents, such as—for some of us—philosophical theories of knowledge, wisdom, and understanding). My empirical work has also engaged philosophical questions about the mind, including similarities and differences in concepts and their development across cultures, the nature of human social cognition, and recently, work in experimental philosophy including work on the role of intentions and other mental states in moral judgments across cultures.
I received my PhD in anthropology in 1999 from the University of California, Santa Barbara, and was a postdoc at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development from 1999 to 2001, prior to joining the anthropology department at UCLA, where I am now Professor. Since 1997 I have conducted fieldwork in Ecuador, in Shuar, Achuar, and Shiwiar communities in Pastaza and Morona Santiago provinces. The members of these communities have been invaluable friends and partners in my endeavor to understand what aspects of human thought are shared by all of us and what aspects vary due to culture, language, and experience. In the Geography of Philosophy Project we have partnered with research teams in nine different countries who will work with a diverse array of communities to ask questions about the mind and the concepts that populate it. I know of no other project that has attempted this blend of philosophy and anthropology on so large a scale. We are fortunate indeed to have assembled such a remarkable partnership, and I’m looking forward to the knowledge, wisdom, and understanding that will result.
