A postdoctoral fellow in philosophy at the University of Quebec in Montréal,
Benoît Dubreuil studies cultural and cognitive evolution. His research draws on political anthropology, paleoanthropology, and cognitive sciences as he focuses on questions related to the reasons why human beings lived for hundreds of thousands of years in small equalitarian bands of hunter-gatherers and why the rise of larger settled communities was universally accompanied by increased social differentiation and, possibly, centralization of political power. Dr. Dubreuil completed his undergraduate work at the University of Laval in Quebec, earned a master’s degree in philosophy from the University of Montréal, and a Ph.D. in philosophy from the Free University of Brussels in 2007. He currently serves as an instructor on the philosophy faculty of the University of Quebec and on the political science faculty of the University of Montréal. In addition to articles on cognitive and cultural evolution, Dr. Dubreuil is the author (with David Anctil) of Introduction à la Science Politique: Idées, Concepts and Regimes, which was published by CEC Éditions in 2008.