Peter Godfrey-Smith
Professor, School of History and Philosophy of Science, University of Sydney
Howison Lectures in Philosophy
September 24, 2025 — 4:10 pmBanatao Auditorium, Sutardja Dai Hall — UC Berkeley Campus
About this lecture The first part of the talk will briefly survey animal evolution, with an emphasis on the origin of felt experience — consciousness in a minimal sense —in several lineages. Then I will look at two philosophical questions … Continued
Banatao Auditorium, Sutardja Dai Hall - UC Berkeley Campus Berkeley Graduate Lectures [email protected] false MM/DD/YYYYAbout this lecture
The first part of the talk will briefly survey animal evolution, with an emphasis on the origin of felt experience — consciousness in a minimal sense —in several lineages. Then I will look at two philosophical questions that arise around these origins. How could felt experience arise gradually and exist in partial or borderline forms? And how might we decide whether there’s a single feature here —“experience,” “consciousness” — with a few origins and variants, as opposed to a cluster of distinct traits with little real unity.
About Peter Godfrey-Smith
Peter Godfrey-Smith is Professor of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Sydney. He works in the philosophy of biology and the philosophy of mind. He is the author of seven books, including Darwinian Populations and Natural Selection (2009), which won the 2010 Lakatos Award, and Other Minds: The Octopus and the Evolution of Intelligent Life (2016), which has been translated into over twenty languages. His most recent book is Living on Earth: Forests, Corals, Consciousness and the Making of the World (2023).
Photo credit – Dan Boud