Scholars will use two-fold definition of science to better understand human virtue

Source: The University of Chicago Chronicle

Using a $4.2 million grant from the John Templeton Foundation, University scholars are seeking intellectual contributions from scientists and humanists for an interdisciplinary project on virtue.

Project leader Jean Bethke Elshtain, the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Professor in the Divinity School, will join Don Browning, Professor Emeritus in the Divinity School, as co-principal investigators, along with scientific advisor Howard Nusbaum, Chairman of Psychology, to launch the New Science of Virtues Project.

The project leaders are seeking proposals from scholars around the world to examine how the ideas from the natural sciences and the humanities can be brought together to understand human virtue. These scholars hope the project will generate new knowledge, informing often ambiguous, inherited moral, political and religious systems.