Major grants
A selection of recent and ongoing funding awards for Philosophy research at Edinburgh
A History of Distributed Cognition
Dr Mark Sprevak, AHRC Standard Grant c. £600k, 2014 – 2018
Tracing the origins of the distributed cognition hypothesis: Distributed cognition is the notion that thinking extends from beyond our brains to our bodies and even the world beyond (e.g. including tools such as calculators). This project charts the history of models of distributed cognition and their influence on contemporary debates.
This project has since been awarded AHRC Follow on Funding for an art exhibition and outreach workshops with Edinburgh's Talbot Rice Gallery.
A History of Distributed Cognition
An Interdisciplinary Investigation into the Education of Questioning
Dr Lani Watson, Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellowship c. £90k, 2017 - 2020
Exploring how to ask better questions: This project brings together work in epistemology and the philosophy of education, to focus on the role that questioning, and the intellectual virtues of curiosity and inquisitiveness, play in educational contexts. The project looks at what makes a good question, whether we could design an intervention to enable students to ask better questions, and how we might move from answer-based pedagogy to an education system which pays equal attention to the questions we ask as the answers we give.
Perspectival Realism: Science, Knowledge, and Truth from a Human Vantage Point
Professor Michela Massimi, ERC Consolidator Grant c. €1.6mn, 2016 - 2020
Combining philosophy of science, scientific practice, the history of science and the history of philosophy: this project develops a novel position in philosophy of science, called perspectival realism. The project investigates whether scientific knowledge can be both true and perspectival (grounded in well defined scientific perspectives, be they modelling practices in contemporary science or scientific traditions in the history of science).
Perspectival Realism: Science, Knowledge, and Truth From a Human Vantage Point