Rate My Professor Pierrick Bourrat

Pierrick Bourrat serves as a Senior Lecturer and ARC Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (DECRA) Fellow in the Philosophy Department at Macquarie University, where he has been since 2021. He previously held a Research Fellowship at the same institution from 2017 to 2020. Earlier in his career, Bourrat was an ARC Postdoctoral Research Associate and Associate Lecturer in the Philosophy Department and History and Philosophy of Science Unit at the University of Sydney from 2015 to 2017, and a Research Assistant at the Institute of Cognitive and Evolutionary Anthropology at the University of Oxford from 2009 to 2010. His academic qualifications include a PhD in Philosophy from the University of Sydney completed in 2015, an MA in Philosophy of Science from University Paris Diderot in 2009, an MSc in Evolutionary Biology and Ecology from the University of Montpellier in 2008, and a BSc in Biology from University Blaise Pascal (Clermont-Ferrand) in 2006.

Bourrat specializes in the philosophy of biology, with a focus on the evolutionary side, including natural selection, levels of selection, heritability, fitness, and evolutionary transitions in individuality. Together with Paul Griffiths, he heads the Theory and Method in Biosciences group at Macquarie University. He has authored the monograph Facts, Conventions, and Levels of Selection published by Cambridge University Press in 2021. Notable publications include "Reproducees, reproducers, and Darwinian individuals" in Synthese (2025), "Evolutionary transitions in individuality by endogenization of scaffolded properties" in the British Journal for the Philosophy of Science (2025), "Moving past conventionalism about multilevel selection" in Erkenntnis (2025), "Adding causality to the information-theoretic perspective on individuality" in the European Journal for Philosophy of Science (2024), and "From survivors to replicators: evolution by natural selection revisited" in Biology and Philosophy (2014). Bourrat has received the Macquarie University Research Fellowship in 2017, an ARC DECRA grant worth A$441,200 for the project "Inheritance and the Emergence of Individuals: From Concepts to Practice" (2021-2023), and significant funding from the John Templeton Foundation, including A$1,007,000 for "Cognition All the Way Up?" (2024) and A$723,988 for "Evolutionary transitions in individuality" (2021). He is also an Associate Investigator in the ARC Centre of Excellence in Synthetic Biology and co-founded the Sino-Australian Philosophy of Life Science Network (SAPoLSN), organizing international summer schools and workshops.