Kim Sterelny (Australian National University) will speak at the Department of History and Philosophy of Science
Wednesday, 9 October, 3:30-5pm Norms and Their Evolution Almost everyone thinks that there is some explanatory connection between the evolution of the human capacity to recognise, internalise, and be motivated by community norms and the extraordinarily high levels of cooperation that make human social life so unlike that of other great apes. But this consensus, which I share, co-exists with marked disagreements about the specific barrier to cooperation solved by the evolution of normative guidance, and on the timing of its evolution. Philip Kitcher, for example, suggests that normative guidance was essential for any cooperation that was not face-to-face; Rob Boyd, Joe Henrich, and Pete Richerson argue that it was essential for “meso”-scale cooperation, cooperation in groups larger than three or four. In this paper, I argue that normative guidance became important relatively late in the evolutionary construction of our cooperative lives, and was primarily a response to late Pleistocene changes in the economic foundations and social organisation of forager lives in the last 100,000 years of the Pleistocene. Kim Sterelny is Professor of Philosophy at the Australian National University (ANU) College of Arts and Social Sciences. He is a central figure in philosophy of biology and philosophy of science more generally. His areas of expertise include History and Philosophy of Science, Philosophy of Language, Philosophy of Cognition, Palaeoecology, Evolutionary Biology, Cognitive Sciences and Philosophy. Among many other publications, he is the author of Thought in a Hostile World: the Evolution of Human Cognition, Blackwell Publishing Ltd (2003), which won the Lakatos Award, and of The Evolved Apprentice: How Evolution Made Humans Unique, MIT Press (2012). Talk Location: Whipple Museum of the History of Science Free School Lane Cambridge CB2 3RH Map: http://www.sites.hps.cam.ac.uk/whipple/visitorinformation/ <http://www.sites.hps.cam.ac.uk/whipple/visitorinformation/> Following the talk we will go to the pub, and on to dinner. If you would like to join dinner, please contact the organisers. Sincerely, Andrew Buskell Azita Chellappoo Marta Halina -- Marta Halina Department of History and Philosophy of Science Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence University of Cambridge www.martahalina.com <http://www.martahalina.com/> _____________________________________________________ To unsubscribe from the CamPhilEvents mailing list, or change your membership options, please visit the list information page: http://bit.ly/CamPhilEvents List archive: http://bit.ly/CamPhilEventsArchive Please note that CamPhilEvents doesn't accept email attachments. See the list information page for further details and suggested alternatives.
