Robert A. Wilson, "Kin Matters: Relational Beings in the Fragile Sciences" (Oxford UP, 2026)
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What is the central question about kinship that the episode introduces?
Welcome to the New Books Network.
Hello, and welcome to New Books and Philosophy, a podcast channel with the New Books Network. I'm Carrie Figdor, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Iowa. I'm co-host of the channel, along with Sarah Tyson and Lane Neufeld. Together, we bring you conversations with philosophers about their new books in a wide range of areas of contemporary philosophical inquiry. Today's interview is with Robert Wilson, professor of philosophy at the University of Western Australia. His new book, Kin Matters, Relational Beings in the Fragile Sciences, is just out from Oxford University Press. What is kinship? This central question in cultural anthropology is standardly answered in terms of culturally constructed relationships that are unconstrained by biological relationships.
In Kin Matters, Wilson proposes an alternative view that does not separate kin relations from biological facts about reproduction that are universally known, such as the fact that human females are pregnant before they give birth. On the progenitor view, kinship is the cultural elaboration of reproductive relations, which act as constraints on kin relations. Wilson also analyzes incest avoidance or incest taboos from this perspective and draws on clinical findings, primatology, and philosophy of mind and philosophy of biology to develop his biologically based yet non-reductive and culturally variable view of kinship. Let's turn to the interview. Hi, Rob Wilson. Welcome to New Books on Philosophy.
Hi, Carrie Figdor. Thanks
for
having
me. So I'm really looking forward to talking about kin matters, relational beings in the fragile sciences. Before we get to the book itself, maybe you could say a bit about yourself, how you came to philosophy and your interests and then how this book came about.
Sure. I'll try and keep it fairly brief. I'm a philosopher born in Australia in the outback, Broken Hill. I grew up largely in Perth and ended up doing a PhD at Cornell and worked mainly in philosophy of mind and cognitive sciences for about the first 10 years of my career. But then it became clear in those first, say, five years out that that I was really sort of drawing on a lot of arguments from philosophy of science to make cases about, um, issue that I was writing on in philosophy of mind, which was individualism, um, in, um, about the mind. very popular issue in the late 80s, early 1990s. And in fact, that's relevant to this project because over the next few years, as I moved a bit more into philosophy of biology, I found that many of the issues that had come up, as I think it was the philosophy of mind, also came up in the philosophy of biology concerning individuals and how we think about them and particularly think about them as sort of boundaries for inquiry.
Um, so, you know, as you know, um, from your background, individualism in the philosophy of mind is a sort of view about, you know, sometimes it's called, you know, early on, it was called mythological solipsism by, um, Jerry Fodor. And it was this idea that, you know, all the properties that were really relevant for doing a properly scientific kind of science were in some sense contained within the boundary of the individual. Technically they use this idea of supervenience. idea that psychological properties supervene on the intrinsic physical properties of individuals. And, and basically there's an argument about whether that was an appropriate constraint on psychological explanation. Lo and behold, there's a parallel debate about, um, um, you know, things like units of selection, for example, whether if you start to appeal to groups, um, or whether you can just appeal to genes and properties of individuals in order to engage in, um, sort of, uh, explanations about how natural selection, the level at which natural selection operates.
That's just one sort of example. And then the way in which I came to eventually, maybe another 10 years later, articulate the project for this book was about 20 plus years ago, 25 years ago, was I just came to think, well, let's think about the role and conception of individuals across the cognitive, biological, and social sciences.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What is the central question about kinship that the episode introduces?
0:01–11:23
2
How does Robert Wilson describe his personal academic journey and the origins of *Kin Matters*?
11:23–22:13
3
What is the ‘pro‑generative’ view of kinship and how does it differ from the standard anthropological account?
22:13–32:41
4
How does the book link reproductive facts to cultural elaborations of kinship?
32:41–41:41
5
What evidence does Wilson use to challenge the ethnographic claim that kinship is unrelated to biology?
41:41–50:10
6
How are incest avoidance and the Westermarck hypothesis used to illustrate the pro‑generative view?
50:10–57:39
7
In what way does extended cognition help explain the diversity of kinship systems?
57:39–1:07:10
8
What are the next research directions Wilson plans after publishing *Kin Matters*?
1:07:10–1:11:08
Speakers
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