A New Approach to Philosophy
Asking the Tough Questions
What does it mean to know something? When can you be said to understand an idea? Who is considered wise, and why?
While these questions have been given careful consideration by Western philosophers, they have also given rise to a diversity of thought outside the West, which are too often ignored. In fact, concepts of knowledge, understanding, and wisdom might vary dramatically across cultural, economic, religious, and social settings. Or, perhaps not!
The tough question that the Geography of Philosophy Project (GPP) is investigating is, are concepts of knowledge, wisdom, and understanding universal across demographics?
Watch to Learn More
Learn more about these ideas and methods in action by watching “A New Approach to Philosophy” about the GPP on YouTube:
Released on February 2, 2022, the video intends to educate audiences online about the explorations of knowledge, wisdom, and understanding by the Project team, and also about what a cross-cultural experimental philosophy project looks like at a global scale.
The Project’s Approach
The GPP is the first global effect to study how people think of knowledge, understanding, and wisdom across cultures, languages, religions, traditions, and socioeconomic status.
To go beyond literate traditions and to understand how lay people may understand these concepts, the Project is fundamentally interdisciplinary. It involves anthropologists, psychologists, linguists, economists, and neuroscientists, in addition to philosophers.
The Project’s research efforts are distributed all over the world: it brings together dozens of researchers in Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Americas. Through surveys, the GPP examines all over the world people’s conceptions of knowledge, wisdom, and understanding. It is the people answering our questions who truly make up the Geography of Philosophy Project.
What’s Next
As the GPP embarks in the final year of the five-year project, the first results are emerging. A picture is being painted of how similarities and variations in how people think about knowledge, wisdom, and understanding. The cross-cultural effort also. paves the way of how experimental, cross-cultural approaches can be used to scale in the field of philosophy.
Follow the emerging results of the GPP on Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube.