Are concepts of knowledge, wisdom, and understanding universal across demographics? Learn about the global effort to explore diversity outside of the Western tradition of philosophy.
The Geography of Philosophy Project (GPP) is celebrating the conclusion of its investigation into the themes of Knowledge, Wisdom, and Understanding with a final conference on October 13-15, 2022. Register to join online.
Are concepts of knowledge, wisdom, and understanding universal across demographics? Learn about the global effort to explore diversity outside of the Western tradition of philosophy.
Congratulations to Minha Lee, Kristopher Smith, Jo Reijer, and Ny Vasil on recent poster and paper presentations given at SPP, X-Phi Euro, and CogSci 2021 conferences.
Meet the PIs, team leaders, and postdoctoral fellows making the project happen in a new interview series for the GPP. Subscribe to our YouTube channel for updates.
The Geography of Philosophy Project postdoctoral researchers write about their areas of expertise on the Go Philosophy Blog. Please view the guide below to the postdocs’ writing to learn about their work.
Introduction to Ljiljana Pantović: medical anthropology, trust, and authority
Tito in the closet: intersecting with socialism in the field
Emanuele Fabiano, postdoctoral fellow for the GPP Peru Team, organized an event series at Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú (PUCP) with the Amazon Anthropology Group to highlight indigenous perspectives of the COVID-19 emergency.
The event series, which took place virtually on Zoom, invited guest speakers from Amazonian communities in Peru, Ecuador, and Brazil to speak on the effects of the pandemic.
The events were promoted to the extended Geography of Philosophy community on Facebook and Twitter. Since the events took place in Spanish and Portuguese, blog posts were also written in English accompanying some of the seminars.
Since January, our teams have slowly stopped conducting research as COVID-19 spread -- stopping in-person data collection and work with all indigenous communities in Peru and Ecuador. And by early March, we stopped such research in all our sites.
We're still running studies online & working remotely.
The Geography of Philosophy Project YouTube channel is now live, featuring videos from workshops and conferences. These videos provide access to a wider audience and archive their contents.
Available Videos:
PI Clark Barrett on a new generation of cross-cultural research
PI Edouard Machery on the function of the concept of knowledge
Pedro Romero on experiments in a small and large scale societies
Please subscribe to be the first to see new videos.
Edouard Machery, Clark Barrett, and Stephen Stich write posts describing how their work shapes the development and practice of experimental philosophy, and how experimental philosophy shapes their work. Please read a preview below:
University of Pittsburgh
“I have been very involved in the development of experimental philosophy. … Independently of the philosophical upshots of the cross-cultural research on philosophical concepts, this interdisciplinary research is intrinsically fascinating. Identifying universal aspects of concepts such as the concepts of knowledge or wisdom tells us something about human nature, about the way human beings structure their experience. Variation tells us something about the diversity of ways in which human beings can navigate their social world. Finally, doing interdisciplinary work is essential to philosophy: It ties philosophy to important and substantial matters and prevents it from losing itself in empty theorizing.”
Rutgers University
“I am the oldest PI of the Geography of Philosophy Project (GPP) – old enough to have young grandchildren. … Starting in 2000, my students and I were leaders in the creation of the new field of “experimental philosophy” which uses the methods of psychology and neuroscience to evaluate the claims of philosophical theories and assess the evidence offered for those claims. The experimental philosophy movement has now generated over 1000 papers, and has come in second in a poll of “currently hot topics” that “ought to fade away” according to readers of Brian Leiter’s Philosophy Blog. During the last fifteen years, a substantial part of my work has been focused on empirically informed moral psychology.”
University of California, Los Angeles
“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. … 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.”
Read more at https://go-philosophy.com/.
In the blog, Edouard Machery covers the three concepts explored by the Geography of Philosophy Project: knowledge, wisdom, and understanding.
The research of the GPP aims to begin answering open questions about the concepts, such as “Is knowledge ascription sensitive to what would happen if the agent’s belief were false?”, “Who are the sources of understanding?” and “Do wise people or people recognized as wise feel entitled to give advice?”, by providing empirical evidence through a cross-cultural approach.
Each of the core concepts will be researched in the many languages the GPP works with, partly in search of translations. The project will further “examine the frequency of use of these words as well as their semantic (e.g., their relation to other concepts) and syntactic properties across languages”.
The complete readings can be found on Go Philosophy or by following the links below:
Knowledge
https://go-philosophy.com/knowledge-ascription-open-questions/
Understanding
https://go-philosophy.com/understanding-open-questions/
Wisdom
https://go-philosophy.com/wisdom-open-questions/
We're excited to announce our project officially launched a blog: Go Philosophy.
Please visit the blog at https://go-philosophy.com/.
More content is coming soon detailing our research and to discuss cross-cultural topics in collaboration with the GPP teams.
