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John Dupre was born on July 3rd, 1952
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Dupré was educated at the University of Oxford and the University of Cambridge.
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Dupre taught as a philosophy professor at Oxford, Stanford University, and Birkbeck College of the University of London before moving to Exeter.
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Dupré was elected a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in recognition of his work on Darwinism and is a former President of the British Society for the Philosophy of Science.
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Dupré advocates a pluralistic model of science as opposed to the common notion of reductionism. Physical Reductionism suggests that all science may be reduced to physical explanations due to causal or mereological links that obtain between the objects studied in the higher sciences and the objects studied by physics.
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Under this assumption, psychological or biological facts must be eliminable in favor of physical facts, given that the physical conditions do all the causal work. This makes all the other, non-physical conditions causally superfluous. Dupre rejects this idea for a conception of indeterministic, probabilistic causality.
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Dupré is an important critic of biological research programs in the life science community. In particular, he criticizes evolution-biological stories and how they are related in sociobiology and evolutionary psychology. Dupré argues that such projects must remain speculative and reflect on the prejudices of the researchers as circumstances in the world.
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Dupree was elected Vice-President (and President-Elect) of the Philosophy of Science Association (USA). in 2020, he was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
