Peter Godfrey-Smith with Philosophy Talk

If the history of the Earth were compressed down to a year, our species would arise in the last thirty minutes or so of the final hour. But life itself is not such a late arrival: it has existed on Earth for something like 3.7 billion years, covering most of our planet’s history and over a quarter of the age of the universe.

What have these organisms—bacteria, animals, plants, and the rest—done in all this time? In Living on Earth, the philosopher Peter Godfrey-Smith proposes a new way of understanding how the actions of living beings have shaped our planet. Where his acclaimed books Other Minds and Metazoa explored the riddle of how conscious minds came to exist on Earth, Living on Earth turns to what happens when we look at the mind from another side—when we come to see organisms as active causes, not merely as results of the evolutionary process. The planet we inhabit is significantly the work of living beings, who shaped the environments that we ourselves later transformed.

To that end, Godfrey-Smith takes us on a grand tour of the history of life on earth. He visits Rwandan gorillas and Australian bowerbirds, coral reefs and octopus dens. He considers the impact of language and writing, and weighs the responsibilities our unique powers bring with them as they relate to factory farming, habitat preservation, climate change, and the use of animals in experiments. Ranging from the seas to the forests, and from animate matter’s first appearance to its future extinction, Godfrey-Smith offers a novel picture of the course of life on Earth and how we might meet the challenges of our time, the Anthropocene.

About the Speakers

Peter Godfrey-Smith is the author of the bestselling Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness, which has been published in more than twenty languages, and Metazoa: Animal Life and the Birth of the Mind. His other books include Theory and Reality: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Science and Darwinian Populations and Natural Selection, which won the 2010 Lakatos Award. He is a professor in the School of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Sydney.

Josh Landy is the Andrew B. Hammond Professor of French, Professor of Comparative Literature, and co-director of the Literature and Philosophy Initiative at Stanford University. He is also director of Stanford’s Structured Liberal Education program. His research focuses on the intersection of philosophy and literature. Among many other publications, he is the author of Philosophy as Fiction: Self, Deception, and Knowledge in Proust and How to Do Things with Fictions.

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