For the John Templeton Foundation, I wrote about integrating scientific methods with the study of Confucian culture.
Ryan Nichols joined the faculty of Cal State Fullerton in 2006, gained tenure four years later, and became a full professor of philosophy in 2014. He quickly notched up an impressive track record as a scholar, teacher, and book author, with expertise in Chinese philosophy, the philosophy of religion, and the cognitive science of religion. But in 2018 Nichols went back to school, becoming a full-time undergraduate and graduate student at Fullerton and at UCLA, to pursue a specially-tailored program in the social and biological sciences. Nichols’ project was enabled by a grant from the John Templeton Foundation, as part of an academic cross-training initiative designed to equip promising philosophers like Nichols to take advantage of — and contribute to — the latest tools and ideas used in the hard sciences and social sciences.
Nichols’ initial academic training was in the history of philosophy with a special focus on the 18th-century Scottish Enlightenment. “You had figures like Adam Smith, Thomas Reid, and David Hume all doing what they could to change philosophy — and they succeeded,” Nichols says. “They attempted to reorient philosophy on a much more empirical footing. I was inspired to move from studying what they wrote to putting their lessons and philosophy into practice. I had a lingering sense that the deeper questions that I felt were most important just couldn’t be answered by strictly using philosophical methods.” This realization led Nichols to work on understanding how cognitive biases operate in conversations about the philosophy of religion. Meanwhile his growing study of Chinese philosophy opened up possible alternate approaches.