Professor Rob Wilson

Professor Rob Wilson is a philosopher and lecturer of philosophy at UWA in the School of Humanities. His appointment was made as part of UWA's Be Inspired program of recruitment. He explores fundamental questions in the cognitive, biological, and social sciences, and takes philosophy into non-university spaces, such as school classrooms and public events.  His specialisations span computational psychology; evolutionary biology and systematics; health sciences; disability; concepts of disease; psychiatric classification and treatment; and the anthropological and biological study of kinship. 

For the past decade, the study of eugenics has been Rob’s research focus, a focus that continues in modified form in the Australian context, with a focus on cultural forms of eugenics (such as indigenous child removal practices). His work on eugenics seeks to make both positive and transformational changes to marginalised peoples in various ways. Rob is also working on a book manuscript on philosophical issues on kinship, building on a series of articles published in journals on anthropology and in the philosophy of science. 

Rob was born in Broken Hill, News South Wales, where he spent much of his childhood, and later moved to Perth, Western Australia.  Rob built an international reputation teaching and researching in Canada and the United States of America before taking up a position at La Trobe University in Melbourne, Victoria in 2017.

Rob’s most notable career achievements include his time as General Editor of the MIT Encyclopedia of the Cognitive Sciences, his directorship of the five-year project ‘Living Archives on Eugenics in Western Canada’ as part of which he hosted 80 public events and built the public resources at eugenicsarchive.ca, and his longstanding commitment to his ‘Philosophy in the Schools’ project in which he directed the first Western Australia Conference in Philosophy for Children in 1986 and founded Philosophy for Children Alberta in 2008. 

His qualifications include a BA with first-class honours in Philosophy from The University of Western Australia, and an MA and PhD from Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, where he was a Fulbright Scholar from late 1987 until early 1992. 

External positions

• Convenor and chair of the Philosophy in the Community Committee (PiCC) of the Australasian Association of Philosophy.