Kim Sterelny (born 1950) is an Australian philosopher and professor of philosophy in the Research School of Social Sciences atAustralian National University andVictoria University of Wellington.^[1] He is the winner of several international prizes in thephilosophy of science, and was previously editor ofBiology and Philosophy. He is also a member of theAustralian Academy of the Humanities. He is currently the First Vice President of theDivision for Logic, Methodology and Philosophy of Science and Technology of the International Union of History and Philosophy of Science and Technology (2020–2023).^[2]

Sterelny's principal area of research is in thephilosophy of biology. He states "the development ofevolutionary biology since 1858 is one of the great intellectual achievements of science."^[3] Sterelny has also written extensively about thephilosophy of psychology. He is the author of many important papers in these areas, including widely anthologised papers on group selection,meme theory and cultural evolution such as "Return of the Gene" (withPhilip Kitcher), "Memes Revisited" and "The Evolution and Evolvability of Culture."

Together with his former studentPaul Griffiths, in 1999, Sterelny publishedSex 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 fordevelopmental systems theory).

In 2004 Sterelny's bookThought in a Hostile World: The Evolution of Human Cognition received theLakatos Award^[4] 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 tonativist accounts familiar fromevolutionary 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 hardwired modules to the mind/brain. In 2008 Sterelny was awarded theJean-Nicod Prize.^[5] His lectures are published under the title,The Evolved Apprentice. These lectures build on the non-nativist Darwinian approach ofThought 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.

In 2013, he was awarded anAustralian Laureate Fellowship.^[6] In 2004, he received theLakatos Award for his bookThought in a Hostile World: The evolution of human cognition.^[7]

• Language and Reality (1987 – withMichael Devitt).MIT Press:ISBN 0-262-54099-1;ISBN 978-0-262-54099-5;ISBN 0-262-04173-1;Blackwell PublishingISBN 0-631-19689-7;ISBN 978-0-631-19689-1;
• The Representational Theory of Mind (1990)ISBN 0-631-16498-7;ISBN 978-0-631-16498-2;ISBN 978-0-631-16498-2
• Sex and Death (1999 – withPaul E. Griffiths).ISBN 978-0-226-77303-2
• The Evolution of Agency and Other Essays (2001).ISBN 978-0-521-64231-6
• Dawkins vs. Gould (2001). New, revised edition 2003, Icon BooksISBN 978-1-84046-471-9.
• Thought in a Hostile World: The evolution of human cognition (2003)ISBN 0-631-18887-8;ISBN 978-0-631-18887-2;ISBN 978-0-631-18887-2
• What is Biodiversity (2008 – with James Maclaurin).ISBN 978-0-226-50081-2
• The Major Transitions in Evolution Revisited (2011 – ed., with Brett Calcott). MIT Press,ISBN 978-0-262-01524-0
• The Evolved Apprentice (2012). MIT Press,ISBN 978-0-262-01679-7
• Cooperation and its Evolution (2013 – ed., with Richard Joyce, Brett Calcott and Ben Fraser). MIT Press,ISBN 978-0-262-01853-1
• From Signal to Symbol: The Evolution of Language, (2021) Ronald J. Planer and Kim Sterelny. MIT Press,ISBN 9780262045971

• Kim Sterelny, Australian National Universityprofile

• Living people
• 20th-century Australian philosophers
• 21st-century Australian philosophers
• Jean Nicod Prize laureates
• Academic staff of Victoria University of Wellington
• Academic staff of the Australian National University
• 1950 births
• Extended evolutionary synthesis
• Lakatos Award winners
• Philosophers of biology

• Articles with short description
• Short description matches Wikidata
• Use Australian English from January 2017
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