| |
| |
Current Research
My current research focuses on several interrelated topics:
- The evolution of religion, morality and prosociality. Why do human beings have religious beliefs and engage in religious behaviors? Are religious beliefs linked in any way to moral judgments, and do they enhance in-group cooperation? Are such links universal cross-culturally? Might the combination of religious beliefs/behaviors and moral judgments have arisen through cultural group selection? Is thorough-going atheism or physicalism really psychologically possible for human beings? These are questions that I am exploring with my colleagues at HECC and other international institutions, both in the form of collaborative journal review articles and experimental research projects. They are also the focus of several grant applications, on which I am PI or co-collaborator, aimed at funding large, radically interdisciplinary research teams.
Recent, Forthcoming or In Progress:
(Grant Primary Investigator) "The Evolution of Religion and Morality," SSHRC Partnership Grant, designed to create an international partnered research centre between UBC, SFU, University of Oxford's Centre for Anthropology and Mind, and Aarhus (Denmark) University's Religion, Cognition and Culture research unit. (LOI approved, full application to be submitted November 2012)
(Grant Co-investigator) Templeton World Charities Foundation, “Is Religion Natural? The Chinese Challenge” (PI: Justin Barrett);
“Religious Studies as a Biological Science” (58 ms. pages) (second author, w/ Joseph Bulbulia), (in progress)
“Evolutionary Cognitive Science and the Study of Religion” (36 ms. pages) (lead author, w/ Joseph Bulbulia), Religion (under revision)
Recent, Forthcoming or In Progress:
Feature Review: “Chinese Thought from an Evolutionary Perspective, a Review of Donald Munro, A Chinese Ethics for the New Century: The Ch’ien Mu Lectures in History and Culture, and Other Essays on Science and Confucian Ethics,” Philosophy East & West 57:3 (July 2007): 375–388.
“Toward an Empirically Responsible Ethics: Cognitive Science, Virtue Ethics, and Effortless Attention in Early Chinese Thought,” in Effortless Attention: A New Perspective in the Cognitive Science of Attention and Action, ed. Brian Bruya, 247-286. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press (2010). [To be translated into Chinese and reprinted in a special edition of 中國哲學與文化 (The Journal of Chinese Philosophy and Culture) 8 (November 2010).]
“Virtue Ethics and the Problem of Ethical Spontaneity,” in Ethics in Ancient China & Greco-Roman Antiquity, ed. by Dennis Schilling and Richard King, Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter (forthcoming).
“The Situationist Critique and Early Confucian Virtue Ethics” (52 ms. pages), Ethics (accepted, forthcoming January 2011)
“‘Of What Use Are the Odes?’ Cognitive Science, Virtue Ethics, and Early Confucian Ethics,” Philosophy East & West 61.1 (forthcoming January 2011): 80-109. [To be reprinted in New Directions in Chinese Philosophy (ed. Cheng Chung-yi and Cheung Chan-fai), Chinese University of Hong Kong Press, early 2011.]
Embodying Virtue: Cognitive Science, Virtue Ethics and Early Chinese Thought (book ms., in progress)
- Effortless action or wu-wei. This was the focus on my first monograph (2003), and I have since returned to the topic recently armed with new insights gleaned from cognitive science. Effortless action, or unselfconscious spontaneity, is also central to the psychology of virtue ethics, which portrays truly virtuous action as arising in an wu-wei fashion. I have recently become convinced that the link between virtue and spontaneity is centrally related to certain human cooperation problems, such as how to reliably identify genuine cooperators and unmask free-riders. I have preliminary plans to explore these issues empirically with colleagues in the cognitive sciences, and am also in the process of writing a more popular treatment of wu-wei for a general audience.
Recent, Forthcoming or In Progress:
“The Problem of Moral Spontaneity in the Guodian Corpus,” Dao: A Journal of Comparative Philosophy 7.3 (Fall 2008): 237-256.
“Confucius Meets Cognition: New Answers to Old Questions” (24 ms. pages) (second author, w/ Rolf Reber), Religion, Brain and Behaviour (under revision, October 2010)
Trying Not To Try: Effectiveness, Charisma, and the Paradox of Spontaneity (trade book, in progress)
- Humanities-Natural Science Integration. I have long felt that the humanities has been paralyzed over the past few decades by extreme forms of social constructivism or “postmoderism,” to use a term that no one likes but that I think is quite description and accurately picks out a theoretical stance that is not only very much alive, but still the default position in the fields in which I was trained (religious studies and Asian studies), as well as many other core humanities fields (literature, art history, cultural anthropology, etc.). My last monograph made the case to my fellow humanists for why we need to move beyond postmodernism and embrace “vertical integration” or “consilience” with the natural science; making this theoretical argument, in various forms, has been my central focus for the past few years. I am now turning more toward applications or “proof of concept”—actual applications of cognitive science or evolutionary theory to my areas of study—but am still very much involved in defending and advancing the cause of science-humanities integration at a meta-theoretical level.
Recent, Forthcoming or In Progress:
What Science Offers the Humanities: Integrating Body & Culture. New York: Cambridge University Press, February 2008
“Good and Bad Reductionism: Acknowledging the Power of Culture,” invited response to Joseph Carroll target article, “An Evolutionary Paradigm for Literary Study”, Style 42.2-3 (Summer/Fall 2008): 266-271.
“Consilience and the Status of Human Level Truth,” in A Vision of Transdisciplinarity; Laying Foundations for a World Knowledge Dialogue, ed. Frédéric Darbellay, Moira Cockell, Jérôme Billotte and Francis Waldvogel, 51-60. Lausanne, Switzerland: EPFL Press, 2008.
“Who’s Afraid of Reductionism? The Study of Religion in the Age of Cognitive Science,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 76.2 (June 2008): 375-411. Accompanied by “Reply to Cho & Squier” (418-419) and “Response to Cho & Squier” (449-454).
(Edited) Creating Consilience: Integrating the Sciences and the Humanities (lead editor, with Mark Collard), forthcoming 2011, Oxford University Press, New Directions in Cognitive Science series.
“Creating Consilience: Toward a Second Wave” (lead author, w/ Mark Collard), in Creating Consilience, Integrating the Sciences and the Humanities, ed. Edward Slingerland and Mark Collard, New York: Oxford University Press (forthcoming).
“Mind-Body Dualism and the Two Cultures,” in Creating Consilience, Integrating the Sciences and the Humanities, ed. Edward Slingerland and Mark Collard, New York: Oxford University Press (forthcoming).
|
|
|
|
| |
|
