Philosophy professor Laurie “L.A.” Paul at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill has won a Guggenheim Fellowship and a $4.8 million grant from the John Templeton Foundation to support her research.
Paul’s main research interests are in metaphysics and philosophy of the mind.
The new support is for a project on “transformative experience and decision making,” which explores “how we should understand real-world experiences and our capacity to rationally map our subjective futures, drawing on recent work in normative decision theory, cognitive science, epistemology and the philosophy of the mind.”
Paul argues that as we live our lives, we repeatedly make decisions that shape our future circumstances and affect the sort of person we will become. She is teaching an honors course on this topic in UNC’s College of Arts and Sciences this spring.
The John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, based in New York City, appoints fellows based on prior achievement and exceptional promise in research and artistic creation.The Guggenheim foundation awarded fellowships to a diverse group of 178 scholars, artists and scientists across 56 disciplines, 83 academic institutions, 29 states and two Canadian provinces. The candidates were chosen from among a group of almost 3,000 applicants. Many Nobel, Pulitzer and other prize winners are fellowship alumni.
Paul is co-principal investigator on the John Templeton Foundation grant, working with colleagues at Notre Dame, Duke University and Harvard University.
The John Templeton Foundation serves as a philanthropic catalyst for discoveries relating to “the big questions of human purpose and ultimate reality.”
