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31Modularity, and the Psychoevolutionary Theory of EmotionBiology and Philosophy 5 (2): 175. 1990.It is unreasonable to assume that our pre-scientific emotion vocabulary embodies all and only those distinctions required for a scientific psychology of emotion. The psychoevolutionary approach to emotion yields an alternative classification of certain emotion phenomena. The new categories are based on a set of evolved adaptive responses, or affect-programs, which are found in all cultures. The triggering of these responses involves a modular system of stimulus appraisal, whose evoluations may c…Read more
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29Exploring the Folkbiological Conception of Human NaturePhilosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B-Biological Sciences 366 (1563): 444. 2011.Integrating the study of human diversity into the human evolutionary sciences requires substantial revision of traditional conceptions of a shared human nature. This process may be made more difficult by entrenched, 'folkbiological' modes of thought. Earlier work by the authors suggests that biologically naive subjects hold an implicit theory according to which some traits are expressions of an animal's inner nature while others are imposed by its environment. In this paper, we report further st…Read more
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28Cycles of Contingency: Developmental Systems and Evolution (edited book)MIT Press. 2001.The nature/nurture debate is not dead. Dichotomous views of development still underlie many fundamental debates in the biological and social sciences. Developmental systems theory offers a new conceptual framework with which to resolve such debates. DST views ontogeny as contingent cycles of interaction among a varied set of developmental resources, no one of which controls the process. These factors include DNA, cellular and organismic structure, and social and ecological interactions. DST has …Read more
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28Dissecting developmental biologyStudies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 53 134-138. 2015.
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25Emotion and the problem of psychological categoriesIn Alfred W. Kazniak (ed.), Emotions, Qualia and Consciousness, World Scientific. pp. 28--41. 2001.Emotion theory is beset by category disputes. Examining the nature and function of scientific classification can make some of these more tractable. The aim of classification is to group particulars into <<natural>> classes - classes whose members share a rich cluster of properties in addition to those used to place them in the class. Classification is inextricably linked to theories of the causal processes that explain why certain particulars resemble one another and so are usefully regarded as …Read more
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24Discussion: Three ways to misunderstand developmental systems theoryBiology and Philosophy 20 (2-3): 417-425. 2005.Developmental systems theory is a general theoretical perspective on development, heredity and evolution. It is intended to facilitate the study of interactions between the many factors that influence development without reviving `dichotomous' debates over nature or nurture, gene or environment, biology or culture. Several recent papers have addressed the relationship between DST and the thriving new discipline of evolutionary developmental biology. The contributions to this literature by evolut…Read more
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20Beyond Concepts: Unicepts, Language, and Natural Information: Millikan, Ruth Garrett, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017, pp. iv + 240, £25.00 (hardback) (review)Australasian Journal of Philosophy 98 (1): 205-208. 2020.Volume 98, Issue 1, March 2020, Page 205-208.
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19Jesse Prinz Gut Reactions: A Perceptual Theory of Emotion (review)British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 59 (3): 559-567. 2008.
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16Conceptual Barriers to Interdisciplinary CommunicationIn Crowley OâRourke, Eigenbrode Stephen, Wulfhorst Sanford D. & Michael J. D. (eds.), Enhancing Communication & Collaboration in Interdisciplinary Research, Sage Publications. pp. 195-215. 2014.21 page
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16Author’s responseMetascience 8 (1): 49-62. 1999.The air of consensus in these reviews is, as McNaughton notes, methodological. The future of philosophical emotion theory is in synthesising what a wide range of science has to tell us and using this to reflect on the nature of mind in general. In this respect the philosophy of emotion has been seriously out of step with the rest of a very exciting contemporary scene in the philosophy of mind. Whatever the shortcomings of my own attempt to bring the philosophy of emotion into contact with the re…Read more
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15Book Reviews : Alexander Rosenberg, Philosophy of Social Science. Westview, Boulder, CO, 1988. Pp. xiv, 218, $35.00 (cloth), $18.95 (paper (review)Philosophy of the Social Sciences 21 (2): 290-293. 1991.
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14Who’s afraid of the nanny state? Introduction to a symposiumPublic Health 129 (8): 1017--1020. 2015.
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137 The Fearless Vampire Conservator: Philip Kitcher, Genetic Determinism, and the Informational GeneIn Eva M. Neumann-Held, Christoph Rehmann-Sutter, Barbara Herrnstein Smith & E. Roy Weintraub (eds.), Genes in Development: Re-reading the Molecular Paradigm, Duke University Press. pp. 175-198. 2006.
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9Mechanisms can be complex: Talia Morag: Emotion, Imagination, and the Limits of Reason. Abingdon, Oxon & New York: Routledge, 2016, 288 pp, £88.00 HB (review)Metascience 26 (3): 387-391. 2017.
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8EmotionsIn William Bechtel & George Graham (eds.), A Companion to Cognitive Science, Blackwell. 2017.Emotions are an extremely salient and important aspect of human mental life. However, until recently they have not attracted much attention in cognitive science. Despite this neglect by cognitive scientists, other investigators have been actively studying emotions and developing theoretical perspectives on them. These theoretical perspectives raise a number of important questions that cognitive scientists will have to address as they bring emotions into their purview: (1) Is it the physiological…Read more
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7The Case for Basic Biological ResearchTrends in Molecular Medicine 25 (2). 2019.The majority of biomedical and biological research relies on a few molecular biology techniques. Here we show that eight key molecular biology techniques would not exist without basic biological research.We also find that the scientific reward system does not sufficiently value basic biological research into molecular mechanisms.
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3Introduction: What is developmental systems theory?In Susan Oyama, Paul Griffiths & Russell D. Gray (eds.), Cycles of Contingency: Developmental Systems and Evolution, Mit Press. pp. 1-11. 2001.
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3Embryology, Epigenesis and Evolution: Taking Development Seriously (review)Philosophy in Review 25 (3): 213-215. 2005.
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2Book Reviews : Alexander Rosenberg, Philosophy of Social Science. Westview, Boulder, CO, 1988. Pp. xiv, 218, $35.00 (cloth), $18.95 (paper (review)Philosophy of the Social Sciences 21 (2): 290-293. 1991.
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2Conceptual change and conceptual diversity contribute to progress in scienceIn Gabriele Bammer (ed.), Change! Combining Analytic Approaches with Street Wisdom, Australian National University Press. pp. 163--176. 2015.
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1Adaptive Explanation and the Concept of a VestigeIn David L. Hull (ed.), A review of Paul Griffiths (ed.), Trees of Life: Essays in Philosophy of Biology, Kluwer Academic Publishers, Dordrecht, 1992, 276 pp. $96.00, Kluwer. pp. 111-131. 1994.
Areas of Specialization
Philosophy of Biology |
Philosophy of Medicine |
Philosophy of Mind |
General Philosophy of Science |
Areas of Interest
Applied Ethics |
Philosophy of Cognitive Science |