Peter Godfrey-Smith is a Professor in the School of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Sydney.
He taught at Stanford University from 1991 to 2003, after which he held a half-time position at the Australian National University alongside a visiting appointment at Harvard University. He then joined Harvard full-time, serving as Professor of Philosophy from 2006 to 2011, before moving to the CUNY Graduate Center, where he worked from 2011 to 2017. Godfrey-Smith began a half-time appointment in the HPS program at the University of Sydney in 2015, transitioning to a full-time role in 2017.
Godfrey-Smith’s research focuses primarily on the philosophy of biology and the philosophy of mind. He also works on pragmatism, especially the philosophy of John Dewey, along with general philosophy of science, and selected areas of metaphysics and epistemology.
He is the author of seven books, including Complexity and the Function of Mind in Nature (1996), Theory and Reality: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Science (2003), and Darwinian Populations and Natural Selection (2009), which received the 2010 Lakatos Award. His subsequent works include Philosophy of Biology (2014); the international bestseller Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness (2016), shortlisted for the 2017 Royal Society Science Book Prize and translated into more than twenty languages; Metazoa: Animal Life and the Birth of the Mind (2020); and Living on Earth: Forests, Corals, Consciousness and the Making of the World (2023).
His photos and videos have appeared in The New York Times, National Geographic, The Guardian, Forbes, The Boston Globe, and other outlets.
Godfrey-Smith holds an undergraduate degree from the University of Sydney and a PhD in philosophy from the University of California, San Diego.
