Funded Projects
Anatomy of Agency
With research collaborators Daniel Lim, Joey Wagoner, Marcus Bingenheimer, Justin Brody and others, we are conducting a series of experimental philosophy studies in the cross-cultural philosophy of religion. Our experimental studies range over issues about methodological problems in the experimental philosophy of free will, omniscience and free will, and effects of cross-cultural cognitive style on reasoning in philosophy of religion. A data science component of the project is underway examining a Buddhist corpora of Indian source texts translated into Chinese, of Chinese apocryphal Buddhist texts, and of Chinese source texts to examining how concepts of agency were sinified as Buddhism entered and flourished in China. This project is made possible by generous funding from the John Templeton Foundation via a subaward through Hillsdale College’s Experimental Philosophy of Religion project. N.B. Due to factors outside our control, Daniel Lim receives no grant funding from Hillsdale College or the John Templeton Foundation for his work on this project.
Philosophy of Science for Cultural Evolution
With the advisory assistance of Grant Ramsey, Tim Lewens, and Kim Sterelny, I drafted a white paper for the John Templeton Foundation identifying some of the most pressing philosophy of science problems emergent from cultural evolutionary research.
Explanatory Mechanisms in Cultural Evolutionary Science
With the generous support of the Borchard Foundation, Henrike Moll (co-PI) and I held a workshop in July 2022 at Domaine de la Bretesche in Brittany, France, about mechanisms in cultural evolution. Attending participants were Mathieu Charbonneau, Emma Flynn, Hugo Mercier, Olivier Morin, Joëlle Proust, and Pete Richerson. Our workshop resulted in a special issue (22:5) of Journal of Cognition and Culture.
Academic Cross-Training
My Academic Cross-Training, which occurred between 2017 and 2020, was generously supported by a grant from the John Templeton Foundation. I went back to school taking a full sequence of methods and statistics classes at CSUF and continued as a non-degree graduate student at UCLA taking classes in behavioral endocrinology, social learning in primates, archaeology and more. This work was guided by the premise that each culture develops in the context of a unique physical and social ecology, which leave marks on its patterns of thought and emotion, and philosophies.
Understanding China’s Changing Moral Psychology
China has changed dramatically in the 20th century and, with it, its peoples and their moralities. In that time period people cannot count on an ever-present system of Confucian social relationships and ethical norms suffusing their various lifeways.
Main goals in this area of my research are to bring coherence and completeness to sets of explanations that purport to explain the uniqueness of China and its people and, in the process, use cultural transmission theory to show the causal power of Confucian culture.
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