Peter Godfrey-Smith | |
---|---|
Born | 1965 (age 58–59) |
Nationality | Australian |
Education | |
Awards | Lakatos Award |
Institutions | |
Thesis | Teleonomy and the Philosophy of Mind (1991) |
Doctoral advisor | Philip Kitcher |
Language | English |
Main interests | |
Website | petergodfreysmith |
Peter Godfrey-Smith (born 1965) is an Australian philosopher of science and writer, who is currently Professor of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Sydney. [1] He works primarily in philosophy of biology and philosophy of mind, and also has interests in general philosophy of science, pragmatism (especially the work of John Dewey), and some parts of metaphysics and epistemology. Godfrey-Smith was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 2022. [2]
Born in Australia in 1965, Godfrey-Smith received a Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of California, San Diego in 1991 under the supervision of Philip Kitcher. He previously taught at Harvard University, [3] Stanford University, Australian National University, and the CUNY Graduate Center. [4] Godfrey-Smith was the recipient of the Lakatos Award [5] for his 2009 book, Darwinian Populations and Natural Selection which discusses the philosophical foundations of the theory of evolution. [6] [7]
He has criticized the arguments of intelligent design proponents. [8] He was an early critic of Covid-19 lockdown measures, beginning with a series of Twitter posts in January 2021. [9] [10] [11]
In 2016, Godfrey-Smith published the book Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness . [12] It explores the origin of sentience, consciousness and intelligence in the animal kingdom, specifically how it evolved in cephalopods compared to mammals and birds. [13] [14] [15]
Darwinism is a theory of biological evolution developed by the English naturalist Charles Darwin (1809–1882) and others, stating that all species of organisms arise and develop through the natural selection of small, inherited variations that increase the individual's ability to compete, survive, and reproduce. Also called Darwinian theory, it originally included the broad concepts of transmutation of species or of evolution which gained general scientific acceptance after Darwin published On the Origin of Species in 1859, including concepts which predated Darwin's theories. English biologist Thomas Henry Huxley coined the term Darwinism in April 1860.
Daniel Clement Dennett III was an American philosopher and cognitive scientist. His research centered on the philosophy of mind, the philosophy of science, and the philosophy of biology, particularly as those fields relate to evolutionary biology and cognitive science.
Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life is a 1995 book by the philosopher Daniel Dennett, in which the author looks at some of the repercussions of Darwinian theory. The crux of the argument is that, whether or not Darwin's theories are overturned, there is no going back from the dangerous idea that design might not need a designer. Dennett makes this case on the basis that natural selection is a blind process, which is nevertheless sufficiently powerful to explain the evolution of life. Darwin's discovery was that the generation of life worked algorithmically, that processes behind it work in such a way that given these processes the results that they tend toward must be so.
The problem of other minds is a philosophical problem traditionally stated as the following epistemological question: Given that I can only observe the behavior of others, how can I know that others have minds? The problem is that knowledge of other minds is always indirect. The problem of other minds does not negatively impact social interactions due to people having a "theory of mind" – the ability to spontaneously infer the mental states of others – supported by innate mirror neurons, a theory of mind mechanism, or a tacit theory. There has also been an increase in evidence that behavior results from cognition which in turn requires consciousness and the brain.
Neo-Darwinism is generally used to describe any integration of Charles Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection with Gregor Mendel's theory of genetics. It mostly refers to evolutionary theory from either 1895 or 1942, but it can mean any new Darwinian- and Mendelian-based theory, such as the current evolutionary theory.
Alvin Carl Plantinga is an American analytic philosopher who works primarily in the fields of philosophy of religion, epistemology, and logic.
Thomas Nagel is an American philosopher. He is the University Professor of Philosophy and Law Emeritus at New York University, where he has taught since 1980, retiring in 2016. His main areas of philosophical interest are legal philosophy, political philosophy, and ethics.
Phillip E. Johnson was a UC Berkeley law professor, opponent of evolutionary science, co-founder of the pseudoscientific intelligent design movement, author of the "Wedge strategy" and co-founder of the Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture (CSC). He described himself as "in a sense the father of the intelligent design movement". He was a critic of Darwinism, which he described as "fully naturalistic evolution, involving chance mechanisms and natural selection". The wedge strategy aims to change public opinion and scientific consensus, and seeks to convince the scientific community to allow a role for theism, or causes beyond naturalistic explanation, in scientific discourse. Johnson argued that scientists accepted the theory of evolution "before it was rigorously tested, and thereafter used all their authority to convince the public that naturalistic processes are sufficient to produce a human from a bacterium, and a bacterium from a mix of chemicals."
In biology, adaptation has three related meanings. Firstly, it is the dynamic evolutionary process of natural selection that fits organisms to their environment, enhancing their evolutionary fitness. Secondly, it is a state reached by the population during that process. Thirdly, it is a phenotypic trait or adaptive trait, with a functional role in each individual organism, that is maintained and has evolved through natural selection.
In evolutionary biology, the Baldwin effect describes an effect of learned behaviour on evolution. James Mark Baldwin and others suggested that an organism's ability to learn new behaviours will affect its reproductive success and will therefore have an effect on the genetic makeup of its species through natural selection. It posits that subsequent selection might reinforce the originally learned behaviors, if adaptive, into more in-born, instinctive ones. Though this process appears similar to Lamarckism, that view proposes that living things inherited their parents' acquired characteristics. The Baldwin effect only posits that learning ability, which is genetically based, is another variable in / contributor to environmental adaptation. First proposed during the Eclipse of Darwinism in the late 19th century, this effect has been independently proposed several times, and today it is generally recognized as part of the modern synthesis.
Orthogenesis, also known as orthogenetic evolution, progressive evolution, evolutionary progress, or progressionism, is an obsolete biological hypothesis that organisms have an innate tendency to evolve in a definite direction towards some goal (teleology) due to some internal mechanism or "driving force". According to the theory, the largest-scale trends in evolution have an absolute goal such as increasing biological complexity. Prominent historical figures who have championed some form of evolutionary progress include Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, and Henri Bergson.
Michael Ruse is a British-born Canadian philosopher of science who specializes in the philosophy of biology and works on the relationship between science and religion, the creation–evolution controversy, and the demarcation problem within science. Ruse currently teaches at Florida State University.
"A Scientific Dissent from Darwinism" was a statement issued in 2001 by the Discovery Institute, a Christian, conservative think tank based in Seattle, Washington, U.S., best known for its promotion of the pseudoscientific principle of intelligent design. As part of the Discovery Institute's Teach the Controversy campaign, the statement expresses skepticism about the ability of random mutations and natural selection to account for the complexity of life, and encourages careful examination of the evidence for "Darwinism", a term intelligent design proponents use to refer to evolution.
Seymour William Itzkoff is an American psychologist and writer who has published research on intelligence. He has taught at Smith College since 1965 where he is professor emeritus of education and child study.
Animal consciousness, or animal awareness, is the quality or state of self-awareness within an animal, or of being aware of an external object or something within itself. In humans, consciousness has been defined as: sentience, awareness, subjectivity, qualia, the ability to experience or to feel, wakefulness, having a sense of selfhood, and the executive control system of the mind. Despite the difficulty in definition, many philosophers believe there is a broadly shared underlying intuition about what consciousness is.
Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False is a 2012 book by the philosopher Thomas Nagel.
Australian philosophy refers to the philosophical tradition of the people of Australia and of its citizens abroad. Academic philosophy has been mostly pursued in universities. It has been broadly in the tradition of Anglo-American analytic philosophy, but has also had representatives of a diverse range of other schools, such as idealism, Catholic neo-scholasticism, Marxism, and continental, feminist and Asian philosophy.
Other Minds is a 2016 bestseller by Peter Godfrey-Smith on the evolution and nature of consciousness. It compares the situation in cephalopods, especially octopuses and cuttlefish, with that in mammals and birds. Complex active bodies that enable and perhaps require a measure of intelligence have evolved three times, in arthropods, cephalopods, and vertebrates. The book reflects on the nature of cephalopod intelligence in particular, constrained by their short lifespan, and embodied in large part in their partly autonomous arms which contain more nerve cells than their brains.
Catherine Warren Wilson is a British/American/Canadian philosopher. She was formerly Anniversary Professor at the University of York and from 2009 to 2012 the Regius Professor of Moral Philosophy at the University of Aberdeen. She is known for her interdisciplinary studies of visuality, moral psychology and aesthetics, and especially early microscopy and Epicurean atomism and materialism.