“We’re brought up thinking that the way you do humanities research is on your own,” says Russell Wyland, deputy director of research programs at the National Endowment for the Humanities. “We fund a lot of philosophers to write their books, to write their articles.” The John Templeton Foundation has done plenty of that, too, but it is also flooding philosophy with much larger grants, of previously unheard-of ambition and scope, which give philosophers a new power to convene researchers from other disciplines. The new Templeton grants vary in the degree to which they include subgrants for scientific research. A considerable portion of Alfred R. Mele’s project on free will at Florida State University, for instance, goes to neuroscientific experiments, while others, like Barry Loewer’s project on cosmology at Rutgers University, consist mainly of opportunities for interdisciplinary discussion, like conferences and publications. In each case, however, philosophers are taking the lead in framing the projects, rather than being relegated to playing catch-up with the better-financed investigations of scientists.
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