Scholars from across the country are engaged this fall in a lively web-based conversation about the many aspects of wisdom, the subject at the heart of the University of Chicago Arete Initiative's Defining Wisdom Project.
The project is a continuing effort to better understand the role of wisdom in human understanding. In addition to the website exchanges between researchers, scholars from diverse fields have presented their own research at conferences supported by the project. Conference participants recently looked at how an expanded understanding of wisdom could deepen decision-making models that focus primarily on human reason.
The papers included topics such as Wisdom, Ethics, and the Medical Profession; Mathematics and Wisdom in the European Enlightenment; and the Interaction of Individual and Institutional Wisdom, a topic that pointed to the inherent challenge of studying wisdom.
Individuals as well as groups are capable of making insightful decisions, but sometimes those insights and goals conflict. A doctor's wishes to do the right thing for a patient may conflict with budget restrictions at a hospital, for instance. But without the hospital, the doctor couldn't treat the patient. Resolving the differences is in itself an exercise in wisdom, said John Cacioppo, the Tiffany & Margaret Blake Distinguished Service Professor in Psychology and the College.
"The goal of the Defining Wisdom Project is to stimulate new distinctive scientific and scholarly contributions to wisdom research and to foster interdisciplinary collaboration and understanding to lay the foundation for a field of wisdom science," said Cacioppo, who co-directs the project with Howard Nusbaum, Chairman of Psychology.
The project has selected 23 scholars in more than 15 different disciplines from a group of 600-plus applicants who proposed projects for research to examine broader questions related to wisdom.
"This project seeks to create a science of wisdom through collaboration and discussion among the scholars and scientists in the humanities, and the social, biological, and physical sciences," Nusbaum said. The work will lead to a book drawn from the different projects.
The John Templeton Foundation is providing $2 million in grant funding to promising scholars to establish the Research Initiative on the Nature and Benefits of Wisdom.