Hiram Caton

Hiram Pendleton Caton III (16 August 1936 – 13 December 2010) was a Professor of politics and history at Griffith University, Brisbane, Australia, until his retirement. He was an ethicist, a Fellow of the Australian Institute of Biology (since 1994), and a founding member of the Association for Politics and the Life Sciences. He was an officer of the International Society for Human Ethology. Caton held a National Humanities Fellowship at the National Humanities Center in 1982–83. He was the inaugural Professor of Humanities at Griffith University in Brisbane, and later the Professor of Politics and History and Head of the School of Applied Ethics there.

Education

Caton studied at the University of Chicago and received a PhD degree from Yale, with an (earned) D.Litt degree from Griffith University for his work in modern history.

Research

Caton's work has been concerned with ethics in the sciences (particularly in life sciences and medicine), the history of ideas, and on biological bases for individual, social, and political behaviour. Something of a polymath, he has published some 175 articles, across six or seven fields—medical ethics and bioethics, human ethology, modern political and economic history, anthropology (with special attention to the Freeman-Mead controversy), philosophy (with emphasis on rationalism and positivism), crowd studies, identity psychology, and problems of the integration of biological/evolutionary factors into the social sciences, especially political science.