High-Rolling Philosophers

We don’t normally think of philosophy as a money-intensive enterprise -- all you need to philosophize, after all, are some books and a brain. And yet, as Nathan Schneider explains in a new essay, “The Templeton Effect,” in the Chronicle of Higher Education, one of the most important developments in modern philosophy is the arrival of a huge pot of money.

The things I could do with a few million....

Since it was founded in 1987, the John Templeton Foundation has been giving millions of dollars in grants and awards to philosophers, and all that money is changing the sorts of questions philosophers are asking. The foundation was created by the late Sir John Marks Templeton, an eccentric, self-made billionaire who became convinced as he grew older that people who think about big meaning-of-life questions could benefit from the kind of serious funding that scientists receive.

Today, his foundation lavishes support on philosophers, scientists, theologians, and other thinkers who are interested in the “Big Questions” -- free will, spirituality, good and evil, and our place in the universe. Philosophers receive multi-million dollar Templeton grants to study, often in collaboration with scientists, questions like whether or not animals feel pain, or “whether worldly pain and suffering can coexist with a perfectly good God.” One philosophy professor at the University of California at Riverside received $5 million to study the concept of immortality; another at Wake Forest University got $3.7 million to “promote significant progress in the scholarly investigation of character.” For comparison, a typical non-Templeton grant to a philosopher might be around $25,000.

The foundation is particularly interested in religion and spirituality: some of the thinkers who receive Templeton grants are Christians, and many more have spiritual inclinations. The Foundation is open about its belief that intellectual life has become too atheistic. (It’s now administered by Templeton’s son, John, Jr., “a devoted neoconservative and evangelical Christian who finances Tea Party causes on his own dime.”) If the money were given out by a group of typical philosophy professors, it's likely that it would go to fund far less spiritual inquiries But, Schneider explains, philosophers who don’t share the Foundation's spiritual inclinations readily acknowledge that the Templeton philosophers are serious scholars making real contributions.

The Foundation, Schneider concludes, is approaching philosophy with an investor’s mindset: “Grants of a few million dollars are a drop in the bucket for the sciences... but in philosophy, where such sums are unheard of, they have the potential to transform the whole field.” As philosophers use their Templeton grants to establish research centers of their own, that appears to be happening.