Academic Resources
After hunger, a human's most important need is to know what is virtuous.
Defining Wisdom (University of Chicago) As part of the Wisdom Research project, the Wisdom Research Network website features the latest news and publications on wisdom science, and encourages interdisciplinary discussions about how wisdom can play a role in the professions and in public life.
Although religious and moral beliefs are widely held, doubts about them are also very common and skepticism about or even outright rejection of religious and moral beliefs is increasingly a live option for people. But genuine doubt or skepticism about our perceptual beliefs in the existence of an external world is almost unheard of outside of philosophy departments, and even among people there, it is rarely taken seriously in their everyday lives. This project on "Knowing in Religion and Morality" will critically examine to what degree, if any, this difference in attitude toward perceptual beliefs, on the one hand, and religious and moral beliefs, on the other, is justified.
Established in 2009 with a $5 million grant from the John Templeton Foundation, the initiative grew out of sociologist, Christian Smith’s work on Passing the Plate: Why American Christians Don’t Give Away More Money (Oxford 2008). That book examines the complex reasons for the illiberal financial giving of American Christians, and suggests that more liberal giving could accomplish world-transforming change. The research Smith began there is now being extended and developed by a Notre Dame research group conducting interviews around the country in order to understand why some people practice generosity and others don’t.
The Arete Initiative at the University of Chicago began a $3 million research program on A New Science of Virtues in 2010. This multidisciplinary research initiative sought contributions from individuals and teams of investigators working within the humanities and the sciences. This project supports original, scholarly projects that contribute to Virtues research and have the potential to begin a new field of interdisciplinary study. This website serves as a hub for Virtues research, and provides updates on the ongoing research program.
Founded by a small group of philosophers over a grey New Jersey weekend in April 2003, the Moral Psychology Research Group fosters collaborative interdisciplinary research on human mentation and morality. Topics on which the group is working include moral reasoning, character, evaluative diversity, moral emotion, positive psychology, moral rules, the neural correlates of ethical judgment, and the attribution of moral responsibility. This work is everywhere informed by contemporary empirical research in the biological, social and behavioral sciences, and is frequently informed by our own empirical work in such areas as development, culture, social cognition, and brain science. A collaboratively authored volume treating these issues, The Moral Psychology Handbook, appeared with Oxford University Press in June 2010.
The Stanford Prison Experiment web site features an extensive slide show and information about this classic psychology experiment, including parallels with the abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib. What happens when you put good people in an evil place? Does humanity win over evil, or does evil triumph? These are some of the questions we posed in this dramatic simulation of prison life conducted in the summer of 1971 at Stanford University.
The purpose of this website is to be a source of accurate information about the life and work of one of the most outstanding social scientists of our time, the social psychologist Stanley Milgram. His untimely death at the age of 51 on December 20, 1984, ended a life of scientific inventiveness and controversy. But his research and writings continue to influence contemporary culture and thought.
Ethics Updates is designed primarily to be used by ethics instructors and their students. It is intended to provide resources and updates on current literature, both popular and professional, that relates to ethics.
PhilPapers is a comprehensive directory of online philosophical articles and books by academic philosophers.
The purpose of the IEP is to provide detailed, scholarly information on key topics and philosophers in all areas of philosophy. The Encyclopedia’s articles are written with the intention that most of the article can be understood by advanced undergraduates majoring in philosophy and by other scholars who are not working in the field covered by that article. The IEP articles are written by experts but not for experts in analogy to the way the Scientific American magazine is written by scientific experts but not primarily for scientific experts.
The SEP was designed so that each entry is maintained and kept up to date by an expert or group of experts in the field. All entries and substantive updates are refereed by the members of a distinguished Editorial Board before they are made public. Consequently, our dynamic reference work maintains academic standards while evolving and adapting in response to new research.
PEA Soup is a blog designed to provide a forum for discussing philosophy, ethics, and academia. Its mission is to transcend geographical barriers so that moral philosophers from across the globe can converse in much the way that they would with their nearby colleagues. The primary subject matter is ethics, where this includes not only metaethics, normative ethical theory, and applied ethics, but also cognate areas of philosophy, including political philosophy, philosophy of action, and personal identity. The secondary foci are other philosophical issues and professional issues, such as those that arise in teaching philosophy.
The Situationist is a forum for scholars, students, lawyers, policymakers, and interested citizens to examine, discuss, and debate the effect of situational forces – that is, non-salient factors around and within us – on law, policy, politics, policy theory, and our social, political, and economic institutions. The Situationist is associated with The Project on Law and Mind Sciences at Harvard Law School.
There are a lot of fine blogs out there covering the avalance of current neuroscience research. With this blog we want to highlight the many consequences of this growing understanding of the human brain.
Ethics Etc is a forum for discussing contemporary philosophical issues in normative ethics, metaethics, moral epistemology, moral psychology, applied ethics, social and political philosophy, law, and other related areas. Its method is analytical, and it encourages the posting of new ideas and arguments that have not been fully worked out.
An online venue for the discussion of virtue theory, along with announcements of new papers, books, calls for papers, and conferences.
The Character Project is a large interdisciplinary research initiative aimed at exploring human character from the perspectives of psychology, philosophy, and theology.
An online archive of academic resources for the study of character and related topics. The site includes links to books, journals, journal articles, faculty websites, and much more.
