Is Templeton "Philosophy's Bite"?

Recently, I wrote about my grant submission to the Templeton Foundation. In the time since, I have also submitted a "letter of intent" to Templeton for a much more ambitious project to bring together those currently working on the variants of embodied cognition. I promised to write something about Templeton's really smart application process, but that will wait for now. Here I wanted to respond, at least a bit, to those who believe Templeton should be shunned. I'm inspired to do so by a recent pair of articles in The Chronicle of Higher Education. In the most recent one, philosophers react to Freeman Dyson question, "When and why did philosophy lose its bite? How did become a toothless relic of past glories?" While the earlier article doesn't answer that exact question, it draws out the conflicting interpretations of "The Templeton Effect" on philosophy: Many are concerned that Templeton is "buying philosophy", but there is also little doubt that Templeton is motivated by concerns similar to Dyson's... and while Dyson is talking about it... Templeton is aggressively making things better.