| 1 | Name: | Dr. John Dupré | |
| Institution: | University of Exeter | ||
| Year Elected: | 2023 | ||
| Class: | 4. Humanities | ||
| Subdivision: | 406. Linguistics | ||
| Residency: | International | ||
| Living? : | Living | ||
| Birth Date: | 1952 | ||
Born in England in 1952, John Dupré is a philosopher of science, specialising in the philosophy of biology, and a naturalistic metaphysician. He received his PhD from Cambridge in 1981, also spending two years on a Harkness Fellowship as a visiting PhD student at Princeton and Stanford. He taught at Stanford University from 1982-1996, since when he has been at the University of Exeter. At Exeter he restarted the philosophy programme that had been closed in the 1980s, and in 2002 became the founding Director of Egenis, the ESRC Centre for Genomics in Society, now the Centre for the Study of Life Sciences. Egenis is now internationally known as a centre for interdisciplinary research on the life sciences. Dupré’s 1993 book, The Disorder of Things: Metaphysical Foundations of the Disunity of Science, provided an influential critique of the essentialism, reductionism and determinism then still prevalent in post-positivist philosophy of science. In Human Nature and the Limits of Science (2001), he developed a detailed critique of reductive theories of human nature, especially as presented by Evolutionary Psychology. Since the mid-2000s, his work has focused on developing a radically processual account of the life sciences, first articulated in his Spinoza Lectures at the University of Amsterdam in 2006, and most recently extended to an interpretation of the nature of the human in his Gifford Lectures in Edinburgh in 2023. He has published numerous articles and books on these topics, and on evolution, genomics, values in science, race and gender, and a range of related issues in the philosophy of biology. Dupré was President of the Philosophy of Science Association for 2000-2002. He is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and an International Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 2023. | |||