Being Human: The Evolution of Animal Consciousness | Peter Godfrey-Smith

Being Human: The Evolution of Animal Consciousness

Peter Godfrey-Smith, Professor of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Sydney, gives the fifth Being Human talk.

The present landscape of biological science raises many issues touching the meaning and challenges of ‘being human’, from AI to biological sex, consciousness, and free will. The Being Human lectures provide a focused exploration of these issues from leading experts in the philosophy of science, humanities, and other fields, offering a forum for broadening scientific thinking.

This series is co-organised by James DiFrisco and Güneş Taylor from the Crick with Professor Barry Smith from the University of London's Institute of Philosophy.

The lecture will be given by Professor Godfrey-Smith in the Crick Auditorium, followed by a facilitated panel discussion. These lectures are non-technical and accessible to a multidisciplinary audience. There will be a short reception and an opportunity to meet the speaker after the talk.

Our speaker: Peter Godfrey-Smith is a Professor in the School of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Sydney. He completed his undergraduate degree at the University of Sydney and earned his Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of California, San Diego.

His academic career began at Stanford University, where he taught from 1991 to 2003. He then held a part-time position at the Australian National University while also serving as a visiting professor at Harvard University for several years. He later accepted a full-time professorship at Harvard, where he taught from 2006 to 2011, before moving to the CUNY Graduate Center, where he worked from 2011 to 2017. In 2015, he began a part-time position in the History and Philosophy of Science (HPS) program at the University of Sydney, which became a full-time position in 2017.

Godfrey-Smith's main research interests lie in the philosophy of biology and the philosophy of mind. He also engages in work related to pragmatism, particularly the philosophy of John Dewey, as well as general philosophy of science, metaphysics, and epistemology. He has authored six books: Complexity and the Function of Mind in Nature (Cambridge, 1996), Theory and Reality: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Science (Chicago, 2003), Darwinian Populations and Natural Selection (Oxford, 2009), which won the 2010 Lakatos Award, Philosophy of Biology (Princeton, 2014), Other Minds: The Octopus, The Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness (FSG, 2016), and Metazoa: Animal Life and the Birth of the Mind (FSG and William Collins, 2020).

*This lecture series is a collaboration between the Francis Crick Institute and the School of Advanced Study’