Participants

Justin Garson is Professor of Philosophy at Hunter College and The Graduate Center, City University of New York. He is the author of Madness: A Philosophical Exploration (Oxford, 2022), What Biological Functions Are and Why They Matter (Cambridge, 2019), A Critical Overview of Biological Functions (Springer, 2016), and The Biological Mind: A Philosophical Introduction (Routledge, 2015; second edition 2022). His main interest is thinking about teleology in the life sciences and developing its implications for debates in the philosophy of mind, medicine, and psychiatry. His aim for the John Templeton Foundation Science of Purpose Initiative is to explain goal-directedness in living creatures in terms of their capacity to make and use inner representations. In this way, he seeks to place the study of goal-directedness within the context of naturalistic, evolutionary accounts of representation.

Jon Gibbins is Professor of Cell Biology at the University of Reading, UK, where he is Director of the Institute for Cardiovascular & Metabolic Research. He has spent the last 25 years figuring out how blood clotting is controlled, how and why this is may occur in disease, and how the blood cells that trigger this process, platelets, might be controlled to prevent heart attacks and strokes. This work involves a combination of cell and molecular biology, through models of disease, to clinical studies with patients. Jon’s work has led to the discovery of new systems of blood cell regulation and the development of new therapies to combat thrombotic disease. In this study Jon will be responsible for exploring and testing our philosophical ideas with data from the study of platelets – a relatively simple biological system with plenty of scope for mistake making with substantial physiological consequence.

Tilmann Glimm is a professor of mathematics at Western Washington University in Bellingham, Washington, USA. He grew up in Germany and studied mathematics and physics at the Technical University Berlin before obtaining his Ph.D. in mathematics from Emory University in 2003. His main research is in modeling pattern formation in multicellular systems and development, using partial differential equations and agent-based models.

Ray Goldstein received undergraduate degrees in physics and chemistry from MIT, and a PhD in theoretical physics from Cornell University. Following postdoctoral work at the University of Chicago and faculty positions in physics and applied mathematics at Princeton University and the University of Arizona, he moved to Cambridge University as the Schlumberger Professor of Complex Physical Systems in 2006. His research interests span from statistical physics to nonlinear dynamics and geophysics, with particular emphasis on biological physics, both theoretical and experimental. His work has been recognized by the Stephanos Pnevmatikos Award in Nonlinear Science, an Ig Nobel Prize (with Patrick Warren and Robin Ball) for explaining the shape of ponytails, the G.K. Batchelor Prize in Fluid Mechanics and the Rosalind Franklin Medal of the Institute of Physics. He is a fellow of the American Physical Society, the Institute of Physics, the Institute of Mathematics and its Applications, and the Royal Society.

Mary Guzowski is a Professor in the School of Architecture where she teaches and conducts research related to daylighting, solar, biophilic, and sustainable design. Her publications include the books Art of Architectural Daylighting, Towards Zero Energy Architecture: New Solar Design, and Daylighting for Sustainable Design, a variety of web-based design resources, and professional articles. She chaired the development of MS Sustainable Design Program in the School of Architecture, was a co-author of the first edition of the Minnesota Sustainable Design Guide (with John Carmody), and the Carbon Neutral Design Project (with Jim Wasley and Terri Boake). Her current research is focused on biophilic and bio-inspired approaches to daylighting and architectural design. Mary has received awards for design education from the American Institute of Architects’ Committee on the Environment, American Institute of Architects Minnesota, and the Associated Collegiate Schools of Architecture.

Katrin Hammerschmidt is a group leader at the Institute of Microbiology at Kiel University in Germany. Before, she held positions as postdoctoral fellow at the New Zealand Institute for Advanced Study in Auckland, at the University of Sheffield, UK, and at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Biology in Plön, Germany. Katrin is an evolutionary biologist and interested in the origin of the hierarchical structure of life. Exemplary, she investigates the evolutionary transition to multicellularity and the evolution of symbiosis. In her work, she combines the approach of experimental evolution with phenotypic and genomic analyses. Through the integration of evolutionary principles in microbiology she recently started projects in translational evolutionary research and science education. She values interdisciplinary collaborations, in particular with a diverse range of biologists, bioinformaticians, science educators, theoreticians and philosophers of biology.

I am Professor of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, and Professorial Research Fellow in Philosophy, at the University of Reading, UK. I am also a practising psychiatrist in the UK NHS. As a clinician, and a researcher into developmental processes in psychopathology, it has seemed to me that there are important and still unresolved questions regarding causal processes in the behavioural sciences and mental disorder. In ‘Mind, Meaning and Mental Disorder’, written with Derek Bolton, I sought to show how these questions can be addressed by starting with an examination of causal processes throughout biology, which have the illuminating and intrinsically linked properties of directedness and mistake-proneness. In this project, I will work with philosophical colleagues to further develop and scrutinise these, and allied ideas, in light of current philosophical controversies. Then working with colleagues in relevant empirical disciplines, we will use these ideas to generate and test novel scientific hypotheses.

I am ichthyologist and evolutionary biologist interested in all things aquatic, especially how fishes select, obtain, and process food. My favorite study groups are combtooth blennies, common carp, and North American fishes. B.S.: Wildlife Management, University of Wisconsin - Stevens Point, M.S. and Ph.D.: Conservation Biology, University of Minnesota