Department of History and Philosophy of Science

Colin Allen [Director of Graduate Studies]

Colin Allen received his B.A. in philosophy from University College London in 1982 and his Ph.D. in philosophy from UCLA in 1989. He has broad research interests in the general area of philosophy of biology and cognitive science, and is best known for his work on animal behavior and cognition. He has received funding from the National Science Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities. He is coauthor of Species of Mind (MIT Press, 1997) and coeditor of The Evolution of Mind (Oxford University Press, 1998), Nature's Purposes (MIT Press, 1998), The Cognitive Animal (MIT Press, 2002), and Philosophy Across the Life Sciences (MIT Press, 2005). He is also co-editor of a special issue of the journal Biology and Philosophy (Dec. 2004) on animal cognition, in which he has a paper titled "Is Anyone a Cognitive Ethologist?"

Other recent articles include "Animal Pain" (Noûs, 2004), "Transitive inference in animals: Reasoning or conditioned associations?" (in S. Hurley and M. Nudds (eds.) Rational Animals? Oxford University Press, 2005), "Real traits, real functions?" (in A. Ariew, R. Cummins, M. Perlman (eds.) Functions: New Readings in the Philosophy of Psychology and Biology, Oxford University Press, 2002), and (coauthored) "Prolegomena to any future artificial moral agent" (Journal of Experimental and Theoretical Artificial Intelligence, 2000).

Allen is Associate Editor of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, coauthor of a logic textbook, Logic Primer, published by MIT Press, and co-developer of two logic instructional sites on the world wide web at http://logic.tamu.edu and http://www.poweroflogic.com.

Colin Allen is a faculty member in IU's Cognitive Science Program and a member of the core faculty in IU's Center for the Integrative Study of Animal Behavior.

colallen@indiana.edu

Web page