Professor of History and Philosophy of Science
Office: Goodbody 113
colallen@indiana.edu

See also: Professor Allen's home page

Ph.D., University of California, Los Angeles, 1989

• Professor of Philosophy, Texas A&M University, 1989-2004
• Research Associate, Dept of Environmental Population and Organismic Biology, University of Colorado, Boulder 1994-1995
• Associate Editor, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (http://plato.stanford.edu)

I am a philosopher who is interested in evolutionary approaches to animal behavior and cognition (cognitive ethology). I work closely with biologists and psychologists who are dealing with questions about what can legitimately be inferred about the nature of animal cognition from field and laboratory data. I have also published on other topics in the philosophy of mind and philosophy of biology, artificial intelligence and neural networks.

Current projects include a series of papers on animal pain that may lead to a book, a paper on scientific/evolutionary concepts of culture, a book on artificial moral agents, and the capture and analysis of data from web-based logic instructional software to provide context-sensitive feedback to students and to test hypotheses about strategies for teaching and learning logic.

Since 1998 I have been consulting and programming for The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, and I am currently its Associate Editor.

Skipper, R.A., Jr., with Allen, C., Ankeny, R., Craver, C.F., Darden, L., Mikkelson, G.M. & Richardson, R.C. (eds.) (forthcoming). Philosophy Across the Life Sciences, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. A philosophy of biology reader.

Allen, C. 2006. Transitive inference in animals: Reasoning or conditioned associations? In S. Hurley and M. Nudds (eds.) Rational Animals? Oxford University Press, pp. 175-185, in press.

Allen, C., Smit, I. & Wallach, W. 2006. Artificial Morality: top-down, bottom-up, and hybrid approaches. Ethics and Information Technology, in press.

Allen, C. 2004. Is anyone a cognitive ethologist? Biology & Philosophy, 19: 589-607.

Allen, C. 2004. Animal Pain. Noûs, 38: 617-643.

Bekoff, M., Allen, C. & Burghardt G.M. (eds.) 2002. The Cognitive Animal, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. An anthology of original essays on comparative psychology, cognitive ethology, and the study of animal cognition.

Allen, C., Varner, G. & Zinser, J. 2000. Prolegomena to any future artificial moral agent. Journal of Experimental and Theoretical Artificial Intelligence: 12: 251-261.

Allen, C., Bekoff, M. & Lauder, G. (eds.) 1998. Nature's Purposes: analyses of function and design in biology, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. An anthology of previously published essays on the role of teleology in biology.

Cummins, D. & Allen, C. (eds.) 1998. The Evolution of Mind, New York: Oxford University Press. An anthology of original essays on evolutionary theory, psychology, and ethology.

Allen, C. & Bekoff, M. 1997. Species of Mind: the philosophy and biology of cognitive ethology, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. An original monograph on cognitive ethology.