| 1 | Name: | Dr. Peter Godfrey-Smith | |
| Institution: | University of Sydney | ||
| Year Elected: | 2022 | ||
| Class: | 4. Humanities | ||
| Subdivision: | 406. Linguistics | ||
| Residency: | International | ||
| Living? : | Living | ||
| Birth Date: | 1965 | ||
Peter Godfrey-Smith is Professor of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Sydney. He earned his Ph.D. in Philosophy from the University of California, San Diego in 1991. Before his time at the University of Sydney, he taught philosophy at Stanford University, Australian National University, Harvard University, and The Graduate Center, City University of New York. Godfrey-Smith's work has expanded the agenda for both the philosophy of biology and for the philosophy of mind. His two most recent books, Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness (2016) and Metazoa: Animal Life and the Birth of the Mind (2020), have already had an enormous impact, not only in philosophy but also across a wide range of disciplines. The former book has already been translated into seven languages, and translations into 13 more are forthcoming. Together with the more technical presentation given in "Mind, Matter, and Metabolism," these books pioneer a novel and well-grounded approach to understanding mental life. Besides his work in this area, he is also well-known for his work on a number of topics in the philosophy of biology: the concept of function, the understanding of signaling, the theory of multi-level selection, and the structure of Darwinian theory. He has also made seminal contributions to the general philosophy of science, and to the reconstruction of Dewey's pragmatism. Godfrey-Smith's bibliography also includes: Complexity and the Function of Mind in Nature (1996), and Darwinian Populations and Natural Selection (2009), for which he won the Lakatos Award. He received the Royal Society of NSW's Medal for History and Philosophy of Science in 2018 and the American Philosophical Society's Patrick Suppes Prize for Philosophy of Science in 2019. He was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in 2022. | |||