Kim Sterelny

Kim Sterelny is an Australian philosopher and professor of philosophy in the Research School of Social Sciences at Australian National University and Victoria University of Wellington. He is the winner of several international prizes in the philosophy of science, and editor of Biology and Philosophy. He is also a member of the Australian Academy of the Humanities.

Sterelny's principle area of research is in the philosophy of biology. He states "the development of evolutionary biology since 1858 is one of the great intellectual achievements of science.^[1] Sterelny has also written extensively about the philosophy of psychology. He is the author of many important papers in these areas,^[2] including widely anthologized papers on group selection, meme theory and cultural evolution such as "Return of the Gene" (with Philip Kitcher), "Memes Revisted" and "The Evolution and Evolvability of Culture."

Together with his former student Paul Griffiths, in 1999, Sterelny published Sex and Death, a comprehensive treatment of problems and alternative positions in the philosophy of biology. This book incorporated a number of the positions developed in previous articles on the range of topics in the philosophy of biology. At certain points Sterelny and his coauthor differed (for example, on the Darwinian treatment of emotions and on the prospects for Developmental Systems Theory).

In 2004 Sterelny's book Thought in a Hostile World: The Evolution of Human Cognition received the Lakatos Award^[3] for a distinguished contribution to the philosophy of science. This book provides a Darwinian account of the nature and evolution of human cognitive capacities, and is an important alternative to nativist accounts familiar from evolutionary psychology. By combining an account of neural plasticity, group selection, and niche construction, Sterelny shows how much of the data on which nativist accounts rely can be accounted for without attributing a large number of genetically hardwire modules to the mind/brain. In 2008 Sterelny was awarded the Jean-Nicod Prize.^[4] His lectures are to be published under the title, The Fate of the Third Chimpanzee. These lectures build on the non-Nativist Darwinian approach of Thought in a Hostile World, while providing a discussion of a great deal of recent work by other philosophers, biological anthropologists and ecologists, gene-culture co-evolution theorists, and evolutionary game theorists.

Books

• Language and Reality (1999 - with Michael Devitt). MIT Press: ISBN 0262540991; ISBN 9780262540995; ISBN 0262041731; Blackwell ISBN 0631196897; ISBN 9780631196891;
• The Representational Theory of Mind (1999) ISBN 0631164987; ISBN 9780631164982; ISBN 978-0631164982
• Sex and Death (1999 - with Paul Griffiths). ISBN 9780226773032
• The Evolution of Agency and Other Essays (2001). ISBN 9780521642316
• Dawkins vs. Gould (2001). New, revised edition 2007.
• Thought in a Hostile World: The evolution of human cognition (2003) ISBN 0631188878; ISBN 9780631188872; ISBN 978-0631188872
• What is Biodiversity (2008 - with James Maclaurin). ISBN 9780226500812

Notes

1. ^ Sterelny, K (2009). "Philosophy of Evolutionary Thought". in Michael Ruse & Joseph Travis. Evolution: The First Four Billion Years. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. p. 313. ISBN 978-0-674-03175-3. 
2. ^ http://www.victoria.ac.nz/phil/staff/sterelny.aspx
3. ^ "Winner of the Lakatos Award 2004 announced". http://www.lse.ac.uk/collections/pressAndInformationOffice/newsAndEvents/archives/2004/LakatosAward_PR.htm. Retrieved 2008-08-03. 
4. ^ http://www.institutnicod.org/conf.htm