John Dupré

Director, Centre for the Study of Life Sciences (Egenis), and Professor, Department of Sociology, Philosophy and Anthropology; University of Exeter

John Dupré is the Director of Egenis, The Centre for the Study of Life Sciences, at the University of Exeter, and Professor of Philosophy of Science. His interests in the Philosophy of Biology include systematics, genomics, microbiology, and evolutionary theory. He is a long-standing critic of neo-Darwinism and evolutionary psychology. His current research is on the possibility of a fully process-centred biology.

Dupré received his PhD in Philosophy from the University of Cambridge in 1981, and was a Junior Research Fellow at St John’s College, Oxford from 1980-1982. He was a member of the Stanford University Department of Philosophy from 1982 to 1996. Since then he has been at the University of Exeter, where he is currently Professor of Philosophy of Science. He also taught at Birkbeck College, University of London and has held visiting chairs at the University of Amsterdam and the University of Cambridge. He is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and a former president of the British Society for the Philosophy of Science. For ten years he was Director of the ESRC Centre for Genomics in Society at Exeter, part of the ESRC Genomics Network. Currently he holds an ERC Advanced Investigator Award for a project entitled “A Process Ontology for Contemporary Biology”.

The Disorder of Things: Metaphysical Foundations of the Disunity of Science (Harvard, 1993)

This book provides a systematic critique of essentialism, the view that nature contains a unique set of kinds that science aims to discover (‘carving nature at its joints’); reductionism, the idea that in principle everything should be explained in terms of the laws of fundamental physics; and determinism, the belief in a closed set of laws in terms that necessitate everything that happens.

Together these theses define a view of science and nature that is still widely assumed, but that is wholly inconsistent with serious investigation of how actual science works. In its place Dupré offers a pluralistic account of science, in which specific sets of concepts, models, and methods are developed to address particular classes of phenomena and questions.
Processes of Life: Essays in the Philosophy of Biology (Oxford, 2012)

John Dupre explores recent revolutionary developments in biology and considers their relevance for our understanding of human nature and human society. Epigenetics and related areas of molecular biology have eroded the exceptional status of the gene and presented the genome as fully interactive with the rest of the cell. Developmental systems theory provides a space for a vision of evolution that takes full account of the fundamental importance of developmental processes. Dupre shows the importance of microbiology for a proper understanding of the living world, and reveals how it subverts such basic biological assumptions as the organisation of biological kinds on a branching tree of life, and the simple traditional conception of the biological organism. These topics are considered in the context of a view of science as realistically grounded in the natural order, but at the same time as pluralistic and inextricably integrated within a social and normative context. The volume includes a section that recapitulates and expands some of the author’s general views on science; a section addressing a range of topics in biology, including the significance of genomics, the nature of the organism and the current status of evolutionary theory; and a section exploring some implications of contemporary biology for humans, for example on the reality or unreality of human races, and the plasticity of human nature.
More books

(Edited) The Latest on the Best: Essays on Evolution and Optimality. (MIT Press, 1987)

Human Nature and the Limits of Science (Oxford, 2001)

Humans and Other Animals (Oxford, 2002)

Darwin’s Legacy: What Evolution Means Today (Oxford, 2003)

(with Barry Barnes) Genomes and What to Make of Them (Chicago, 2008)

Selected Publications

“Postgenomic Darwinism”, in Darwin, edited by W. Brown and A. Fabian, Cambridge University Press, 2010, pp. 150-171.

(With Alex Powell.) “From molecules to systems: the importance of looking both ways”.

Studies in the History and Philosophy of the Biological and Biomedical Sciences, 2009, 40: 54-64.

(With Maureen O’Malley.) “Varieties of living things: Life at the intersection of lineage and metabolism”. Philosophy and Theory in Biology, 2009. http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.6959004.0001.003

(With Eric Bapteste.) “Towards a Processual Microbial Ontology,” Biology and Philosophy, published online, November 2012.

“Living Causes”, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supplementary Volume, 2013, vol. 87, pp. 19-38.

“The Role of Behaviour in the Recurrence of Biological Processes”, Biological Journal of the Linnean Society, published online, June 2013.
Complete list of publications

Exeter.ac.uk link

Google scholar link

John Dupré

Director, Centre for the Study of Life Sciences (Egenis), and Professor, Department of Sociology, Philosophy and Anthropology; University of Exeter

Quote

Books

The Disorder of Things: Metaphysical Foundations of the Disunity of Science (Harvard, 1993)

Processes of Life: Essays in the Philosophy of Biology (Oxford, 2012)

More books

Publications

Selected Publications

Complete list of publications

Websites