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Peter Godfrey-Smith

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Peter Godfrey-Smith


Born
Australia
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I am currently Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the Graduate Center, CUNY (City University of New York), and Professor of History and Philosophy of Science (half-time) at the University of Sydney.

I grew up in Sydney, Australia. My undergraduate degree is from the University of Sydney, and I have a PhD in philosophy from UC San Diego. I taught at Stanford University between 1991 and 2003, and then combined a half-time post at the Australian National University and a visiting position at Harvard for a few years. I moved to Harvard full-time and was Professor there from 2006 to 2011, before coming to the CUNY Graduate Center. I took up a half-time position in the HPS program at the University of Sydney in 2015.

My main research interest
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Peter Godfrey-Smith isn't a Goodreads Author (yet), but they do have a blog, so here are some recent posts imported from their feed.

125. Tahoe Coyotes

Yesterday on a walk near Lake Tahoe (around where Alpine Meadows meets the Granite Chief Wilderness), I came across two coyotes. I saw the first about 100 meters away, trotting over the granite. Without much evidence, I’ll describe her as a female (see the notes). She paused to look at me…

.. and moved on, threading in and out of bushy areas and gullies.

Here is the scene – t

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Published on October 02, 2025 01:13
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Quotes by Peter Godfrey-Smith  (?)
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“Cephalopods are an island of mental complexity in the sea of invertebrate animals. Because our most recent common ancestor was so simple and lies so far back, cephalopods are an independent experiment in the evolution of large brains and complex behavior. If we can make contact with cephalopods as sentient beings, it is not because of a shared history, not because of kinship, but because evolution built minds twice over.”
Peter Godfrey-Smith, Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness

“When you dive into the sea, you are diving into the origin of us all.”
Peter Godfrey-Smith, Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness

“If we want to understand other minds, the minds of cephalopods are the most other of all.”
Peter Godfrey-Smith, Other Minds: The Octopus and the Evolution of Intelligent Life

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