Research
Grimm’s research revolves around questions of inquiry, understanding, and wisdom as they intersect with the philosophy of science, religion, and the humanities. He is a Life Member of Clare Hall, University of Cambridge where he was a visiting fellow from 2016-2017. In 2022, he received Fordham's Distinguished Research Award in the Humanities.
Grimm is best known for his work on the nature of understanding. The discipline of epistemology has traditionally focused on the concept of knowledge over other epistemic concepts such as wisdom, inquiry, and understanding. While some philosophers, such as Jonathan Kvanvig, have argued that epistemologists should expand their inquiries to include understanding as a central epistemic concept, Grimm's work has significantly advanced and promoted this line of inquiry.
In 2013, he received a $4.2 million Templeton Foundation Grant to lead the "Varieties of Understanding” project. The interdisciplinary project (involving psychologists, philosophers, and theologians) aimed at examining "the various ways in which human beings understand the world, how these various types of understanding might be improved, and how we might deepen our understanding of the world." This project led to a wide range of scholarly outputs, including conferences, collaborative research initiatives, and multiple publications, including the Varieties of Understanding (Oxford University Press, 2019). Along with leading the "Varieties of Understanding" project, Grimm has published multiple, peer-reviewed journal articles on the epistemology of understanding and authored the first "Understanding" for the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
Grimm has also published work on philosophy as a way of life, and was a co-leader on the Philosophy as a Way of Life Project sponsored by the University of Notre Dame and Mellon Foundation along with Megan Sullivan, Steve Angle, and Caleb Cohoe. He is the series editor for Oxford University Press’s Guides to the Good Life, a book series focused on the "transformative ideas that philosophers had about the good life, and the practices and ways of life that help us to pursue it." In 2025, Grimm published A Philosophy of the Humanities, defending the humanities contribution to human progress and exploring questions about the value of humanities field such as philosophy.
Grimm's recent work has expanded in the epistemology of artificial intelligence, collaborating with others on bringing his framework for human understanding into dialogue with work on machine understanding and the possibility of understanding in artificial intelligence systems ("Machine Understanding" in Trends in Cognitive Science, 2026; "Level of Understanding, World Models, and Artificial Intelligence" Philosophical Studies, 2026).
Teaching
Grimm was an Edward Sorin Postdoctoral Fellow at Notre Dame from 2005 to 2006 before joining the philosophy department at the University of Montana from 2006 to 2008. Since 2008 he has been a Professor of Philosophy at Fordham University. He has been recognized for his undergraduate teaching at Fordham, and has lectured on the philosophy of understanding at various universities in China.
In addition to teaching in higher education, Stephen Grimm is the Project Director for The Visions of the Good in the Bronx. The Visions of the Good in the Bronx program receives funding from The Teagle Foundation’s Knowledge for Freedom Initiative, and brings high school juniors from the Bronx to Fordham University’s Rose Hill Campus for a three-week seminar followed by additional mentoring throughout the academic year. The seminar introduces students to college level humanities through exploring questions about how one should live and the good life, as well as mentoring for college prep and essential life skills.
