'Other Minds' author Peter Godfrey-Smith for Living on Earth
Tuesday 17th September
Topping & Company Booksellers of Edinburgh, 2 Blenheim Place, Edinburgh EH7 5JH
7pm
7.30pm
N.B. This event has been moved to the bookshop.
Join us for the eagerly anticipated conclusion to Peter Godfrey-Smith's three-part exploration of the origins of intelligence on Earth, which began with the bestselling Other Minds in 2018 and continued with Metazoa in 2020.
Living on Earth
Peter Godfrey-Smith, the scuba-diving philosopher, examined the evolution of sentience in Other Minds. In Metazoa he asked how that consciousness shaped and was shaped by animal bodies. Now, in Living on Earth, he takes that line of questioning a step further, asking, how has life shaped and been shaped by our planet?
In Living on Earth, Godfrey-Smith takes us on a grand tour of the history of life on Earth. He visits Rwandan gorillas and Australian bowerbirds, returns to coral reefs and octopus dens, 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. Living on Earth shows that Humans belong to the infinitely complex system that is the Earth, and our minds are products of that system, but we are also an acting force within it. We are creatures of Earth, but we hold Earth's future in our hands. It is a responsibility that we must all understand and accept.
About Peter Godfrey-Smith
Peter Godfrey-Smith is a distinguished professor of history and the philosophy of science at the University of Sydney. He is the author of five books, including the bestselling Other Minds, which was shortlisted for the 2017 Royal Society Science Book Prize and Natural Selection, which won the 2010 Lakatos Award for an outstanding work on the philosophy of science.