A philosopher who has written extensively about decision theory and game theory, Brian Skyrms is the UCI Distinguished Professor of Social Science, professor of economics, and professor of logic and philosophy of science at the University of California at Irvine. He also holds a professorship in philosophy at Stanford University. His writing is currently focused on the evolution of conventions, signals, social structure, and the social contract. His earlier work included studies in philosophical logic, causation, decision-making, game theory, and the foundations of probability. Dr. Skyrms uses dynamic models to understand the evolution of norms of justice, commitment, mutual aid, property, and meaning. He is recognized for making significant contributions to the understanding of ethics, specifically, why, if self-interest is a primary human motivation, ethics exist. A graduate of Lehigh University, where he received baccalaureate degrees in both economics and philosophy, he earned a Ph.D. in philosophy at the University of Pittsburgh in 1964. After teaching at California State University in Northridge, the University of Delaware, and the University of Michigan, he was appointed an assistant professor of philosophy at the University of Illinois at Chicago and promoted to full professor in 1970, a post he held until accepting a professorship in logic and philosophy at Irvine in 1980. He was named to his additional professorship in economics, as well as UCI Distinguished Professor of Philosophy, in 1997 and to his present chair in social science two years later. Dr. Skyrms directs UCI’s Interdisciplinary Program in the History and Philosophy of Science. He has been a Guggenheim Fellow, a Humanities Council Senior Fellow and Old Dominion Fellow at Princeton University, a President’s Research Fellow in the Humanities, a National Science Foundation Fellow, and a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. A former president and director of the Philosophy of Science Association and a former president of the Pacific Division of the American Philosophical Association (APA), he has served on the governing boards of the APA and the Western Center of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and currently serves on the boards of UCI’s Institute for Mathematical Behavioral Science and Center for Decision Analysis. Dr. Skyrms is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Sciences and a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Among other honors, he is the recipient of the Paul Silverman Award in Foundations of Ethics, the Lakatos Prize for Evolution of the Social Contract, a Distinguished Alumnus Award for Excellence from the University of Pittsburgh, and a UCI Distinguished Lectureship for Research Award. He serves on the editorial boards of eight scholarly journals and of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. In addition to more than one hundred articles published in academic journals or as chapters in volumes of collected works, he is the co-editor of seven books and the author of six others, including Choice and Chance: An Introduction to Inductive Logic (1966, 1975, 1986, and 2000), Causal Necessity (1980), Pragmatics and Empiricism (1984), The Dynamics of Rational Deliberation (1990), a philosophical discussion of game theory entitled Evolution of the Social Contract (1996), and, most recently, The Stag Hunt and the Evolution of Social Structure, a study of ideas of cooperation and collective action, which was published by Cambridge University Press in 2004.