Mind, Religion & Ethics in Dialogue

A Winner of the Templeton Research Lectures on the Constructive Engagement Between Science and Religion (2005-2008)

Templeton Research Fellows and Bios

Each year, a special Templeton Research Fellow is selected in order to make a series of presentations throughout the year and to compile these discussions and topics into a book length manuscript. In addition, there will be other presentations from noted scholars throughout the year to augment the primary fellow's lectures. The name and bio of each fellow will be provided here during each year.

Martha Nussbaum, Ph.D. (2006-2007)

Dr. Martha Nussbaum is the Ernst Freund Distinguished Service Professor of Law and Ethics at the University of Chicago, appointed in the Philosophy Department, Law School, and Divinity School. She is an associate in the Classics and Political Science Departments, a Member of the Committee on Southern Asian Studies, a Board Member of the Human Rights Program and the Coordinator of the new Center for Comparative Constitutionalism. Nussbaum received her B.A. from NYU and her M.A. and Ph.D. from Harvard. She taught at Harvard, Brown, and Oxford Universities before joining the University of Chicago in 1995. From 1986 to 1993, Ms. Nussbaum was a research advisor at the World Institute for Development Economics Research, Helsinki, a part of the United Nations University. She has chaired the Committee on International Cooperation and the Committee on the Status of Women of the American Philosophical Association, and currently chairs its new Committee for Public Philosophy. In 1999-2000 she was one of the three Presidents of the Association, delivering the Presidential Address in the Central Division. Ms. Nussbaum has been a member of the Council of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a member of the Board of the American Council of Learned Societies. She received the Brandeis Creative Arts Award in Non-Fiction for 1990, and the PEN Spielvogel-Diamondstein Award for the best collection of essays in 1991; Cultivating Humanity won the Ness Book Award of the Association of American Colleges and Universities in 1998, and the Grawemeyer Award in Education in 2002. Sex and Social Justice won the book award of the North American Society for Social Philosophy in 2000. Hiding From Humanity won the Association of American University Publishers Professional and Scholarly Book Award for Law in 2004. She has received honorary degrees from thirty-one colleges and universities in the U. S., Canada, Asia, and Europe. She received the NYU Distinguished Alumni Award in 2000, the Grawemeyer Award in Education in 2002, and the Barnard College Medal of Distinction in 2003. She is an Academician in the Academy of Finland. She is currently President of the Human Development and Capability Association.

Her publications include Aristotle's De Motu Animalium (1978), The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy (1986, updated edition 2000), Love's Knowledge (1990), The Therapy of Desire (1994), Poetic Justice (1996), For Love of Country (1996), Cultivating Humanity: A Classical Defense of Reform in Liberal Education (1997), Sex and Social Justice (1998), Women and Human Development (2000), Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions (2001), Hiding from Humanity: Disgust, Shame, and the Law (2004), Frontiers of Justice: Disability, Nationality, Species Membership (2006), and the new The Clash Within: Democracy, Religious Violence, and India's Future (2007). Her book Liberty of Conscience: In Defense of America's Tradition of Religious Equality will be published in 2008 by Basic Books. She has also edited thirteen books. Her current work in progress includes The Cosmopolitan Tradition (the Castle Lectures delivered at Yale University in 2000 and under contract to Yale University Press), and Compassion and Capabilities (under contract to Cambridge University Press). Professor Nussbaum is Visiting Professor of Law and Classics at Harvard University in spring 2007.

George Vaillant, M.D. (2005-2006)

Dr. George E. Vaillant, M.D., is Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and Director of Research for the Department of Psychiatry, Brigham and Women's Hospital. Dr. Vaillant has spent his research career charting adult development and the recovery process of schizophrenia, heroin addiction, alcoholism, and personality disorder. He has spent the last 30 years as Director of the Study of Adult Development at the Harvard University Health Service. The study has prospectively charted the lives of 824 men and women for over 60 years. His published works include Adaptation to Life (1977), The Wisdom of the Ego (1993), and The Natural History of Alcoholism Revisited (1995). His summary of the lives of men and women from adolescence to age 80 is entitled, Aging Well.

A graduate of Harvard College and Harvard Medical School, Dr. Vaillant did his residency at the Massachusetts Mental Health Center and completed his psychoanalytic training at the Boston Psychoanalytic Institute. He has been a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences, is a fellow of the American College of Psychiatrists, and has been an invited speaker and consultant for seminars and workshops throughout the world. A major focus of his work in the past has been to develop ways of studying defense mechanisms empirically; more recently he has been interested in successful aging. Dr. Vaillant has received the Foundations Fund Prize for Research in Psychiatry from the American Psychiatric Association, the Strecker Award from the Institute of Pennsylvania Hospital, the Burlingame Award from The Institute for Living, and the Jellinek Award for research in alcoholism. More recently, he received the research prize of the International Psychogeriatric Society.

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