Oscar Garcia
Augusto Patiño
The content of this news item has been machine translated and may contain some inaccuracies with respect to the original content published in Spanish.
Since 2018, The Geography of Philosophy Project has been researching and comparing how the concepts of wisdom, knowledge and understanding are conceived in different cultures and languages around the world. "We want to know whether there are common elements in these conceptions and which are not," says Dr. Pablo Quintanilla, philosopher and director of the project in Peru.
This international and interdisciplinary project involves 8 research teams from South Africa, Eastern Europe, South Korea, Morocco, Ecuador, India, Japan and, of course, Peru. In the Peruvian case, we are represented by the Mind and Language Research Group, which has hired Dr. Emanuele Fabiano to do a postdoctorate and lead the fieldwork. The American universities UCLA, Rutgers and Pittsburgh are also participating.
In general, Western philosophy is the predominant and most studied philosophy in the world. In this sense, the novelty of The Geography of Philosophy is that it emphasises the analysis of non-Western cultures. "This is the first time in the history of humanity that a project of this scale has been carried out. Thanks to the Templeton Foundation and the international academic team we have, we can research with the same criteria and objectives so many different languages around the world and then compare the results," Quintanilla points out.
"Thanks to the Templeton Foundation and the international academic team we have, we can research with the same criteria and objectives in so many different languages around the world and then compare the results".
For the second semester of this year, The Geography of Philosophy plans to publish two books associated with and produced within the framework of this postdoc. One of them will be Andean and Amazonian Epistemologies: Indigenous Concepts of Knowledge, Wisdom and Understanding, to be launched by our Fondo Editorial at PUCP. It will include 20 articles written by philosophers, anthropologists, psychologists and linguists who are part of the project, as well as by international guests.
The second book will be in English and will be published by HAU Press of the University of Chicago. It will be entitled Southern epistemology. Indigenous concept of knowledge, wisdom and understanding. Although it will also deal with the epistemic concepts of Peruvian Andean and Amazonian languages, and will share some of the authors with the book at spanish, the articles are different.
The editors of both books will be Pablo Quintanilla and Emanuele Fabiano from PUCP, Dr. H. Clark Barrett from the University of California, Dr. Michael Cepek from the University of Texas, and Edouard Machery from the University of Pittsburgh.
To carry out the fieldwork, Dr Fabiano has had to travel continuously to the Urarina community in the Chambira valley in Loreto. If it was already difficult to get there under normal conditions, even in canoes, it was even more difficult during the pandemic. Fortunately, Professor Quintanilla says that the researcher was able to make the trips as far as possible, and also contacted the villagers via the internet.
In addition, the interdisciplinary research group Mente y Lenguaje (Mind and Language) meets virtually every 15 days during the semester. Quintanilla says that as a control group they have Spanish speakers who are volunteer students at PUCP. They also worked with them remotely.
Dr. Quintanilla emphasises that the most advanced research is carried out at postdoctoral level. Hence the importance of the PUCP organising The Geography of Philosophy programme, because in this way we consolidate our aim of being a university not only for education but also for research.
As a programme that brings together teams and academics from different parts of the world, it positions us as a university that produces knowledge for the world. "This project represents a great positioning for the PUCP, because, as it is very new and involves several countries, it puts our University in the eyes of the world," says our professor.
The Geography of Philosophy project will finish collecting all the evidence in 2022. It is planned to start comparing the results obtained by the various research teams around the world in 2023.
