Biohumanities at Queensland

I draw your attention to the Biohumanities Project at the University of Queensland, Australia. Paul Griffiths, an ARC Federation Fellow, is director of the project. As the site explains,

Biohumanities studies 'biology' in two senses: the scientific discipline of biology and the objects it studies: biomolecules, animals, ecosystems and so forth. The history of biology encompasses not only scientific institutions, apparatus and laboratory practice, but also the objects of biological inquiry. The laboratory fruit fly or a cell-line preserved in laboratories around the world each have their own histories. Similarly, philosophers of biology conduct conceptual investigations of the nature of biological taxa (species, genera, families, etc) as well as studying the distinctive features of disciplines like biological taxonomy whose products are classifications rather than more stereotypical forms of scientific discovery.

I encourage readers to explore the site. But, in particular, I encourage readers to subscribe the Project's podcasts, which includes the proceedings of:

4th Queensland Biohumanities Conference: Evidence-based Medicine. January, 2007. Keynote Speaker: Jerry Ravetz.

3rd Queensland Biohumanities Conference: Idealisation, Mechanism and Reduction: New Directions in the Philosophy of Proximal Biology. December, 2006. Keynote speakers: William Bechtel, Marcel Weber, Alexander Rosenberg.

2nd Queensland Biohumanities Conference: Philosophy of Ecology. June, 2006. Speakers include Mark Colyvan, Jay Odenbaugh, Kim Sterelny, Hugh Possingham, Greg Mikkelsen.

1st Queensland Biohumanities Conference: The Conceptual Impact of the Genomic Revolution. October 2005.  Keynote addresses: Paul Griffiths & Karola Stotz, John Dupré & Maureen O'Malley, Kenneth Schaffner.

Other speakers featured on the site include Samir Okasha, Jonathan Kaplan and Robert Solomon. All worthwhile stuff!