Peter Godfrey-Smith

Peter Godfrey-Smith is an Australian philosopher of science and biology, professor of history and philosophy of science at the University of Sydney, who previously taught at Stanford, Harvard and the City University of New York. His academic work covers evolutionary theory, pragmatism and the evolution of mind. A keen scuba diver, he wrote Other Minds (2016) about octopuses and cuttlefish, animals whose complex minds evolved separately from ours. With Metazoa (2020) he traced how subjective experience arose step by step through the history of animal life.

Key ideas

• Complex minds evolved at least twice, in vertebrates and in cephalopods, along largely independent paths.
• Much of an octopus's nervous system lies in its arms, which raises questions about how unified its experience is.
• Minds grew out of the coordination of sensing and acting in living bodies.
• Subjective experience did not appear all at once; it came in degrees over evolutionary history.

Major works

• Other Minds: The Octopus and the Evolution of Intelligent Life (2016)
• Metazoa: Animal Life and the Birth of the Mind (2020)
• Theory and Reality (2003)
• Darwinian Populations and Natural Selection (2009)
• Complexity and the Function of Mind in Nature (1996)

In the Book corner

• Other Minds: The Octopus and the Evolution of Intelligent Life 2016 · Beginner
  A blend of natural history, diving observation and philosophy of mind, drawing on the author's years of watching octopuses and cuttlefish in…

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