School of History and Philosophy of Science

University of Sydney

How to contact me

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Recent:

• Whitehead Lectures, Harvard University, 2023: 1. Limits of Sentience; 2. Boundaries of Consideration

Tolerance and Freedom of Expression (Sir Karl Popper Memorial Lecture, 2025).

Online notes to Living on Earth.

Climatic and Other Catastrophes – a talk given at Columbia in 2022. Science, incentives, lab-leaks, and trust. This is the March 2023 update.

Two corrections to Theory and Reality, 2nd ed.

(Photo by Daniel Boud)

                                            

Other recent papers and talks:

Gradualism and the Evolution of Experience (my most up to date paper on the biology of subjective experience)

Simulation Scenarios and Philosophy (Pacific APA 2023, now published in PPR, open access. Reply to Chalmers.)

Models, Fictions, & Conditionals (about how we can get empirical information from models that are full of fictional elements)

Nervous Systems, Functionalism, and Animal Minds (text of a talk, 2023)

Covid Heterodoxy in Three Layers (4K). Now published. With a Reply to Akçay.

If Not Vegan, then What? (Aeon)

Octopus Debris Throwing (PLOS One)

Moderating Twitter’s Moderators (a short article on free speech)

Tolerance: A Hierarchical Analysis (with Ben Kerr). Preprint

On ‘Longtermism’

Philosophers and Other Animals (in Aeon, with extra notes here).

Food and Farming (draft)

Varieties of Subjectivity

Materialism, Then and Now (where ‘then’ is 1968)

Individuality, Subjectivity, and Minimal Cognition

Loss of Music

Philosophy and Science (New School talk, 2014, NYC)