Evolution and Animal Minds - Public lecture by Prof Peter Godfrey-Smith

The Basser Memorial Public Lecture on Consciousness and Free Will 2025- “Evolution and Animal Minds.”

Acclaimed author Peter Godfrey-Smith will deliver the Basser Memorial Public Lecture on Consciousness and Free Will at Monash University on November 25th 2025 at the State Library in Melbourne CBD. This is a free and ticketed event. Peter Godfrey-Smith’s bestselling and highly readable books Other Minds, Metazoa, and Living on Earth have profoundly challenged and transformed our understanding of sentience and consciousness in animals. Join us for this evening, where Godfrey-Smith will lead us on a fascinating journey through evolution and animal minds.

Doors will open at 6:00pm.

Peter is a professor in the School of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Sydney.

He grew up in Sydney, Australia. He completed his undergraduate degree at the University of Sydney and earned a PhD in philosophy from the University of California, San Diego. From 1991 to 2003, he taught at Stanford University. He then held a half-time position at the Australian National University while also serving as a visiting scholar at Harvard University for several years. He subsequently took up a full-time role at Harvard, where he was Professor of Philosophy from 2006 to 2011, before moving to the CUNY Graduate Center, where he taught from 2011 to 2017.

Peter's main research interests lie in the philosophy of biology and the philosophy of mind. He also works on pragmatism (particularly the philosophy of John Dewey), general philosophy of science, and selected areas of metaphysics and epistemology.

The Baser Memorial Public Lecture on Consciousness and Free Will: 

This bi-annual lecture is the legacy of Leon Samuel Basser M.B., F.R.A.C.P. (1925-2019).

'Uncle Leon' to his family and close friends discovered his passion early in life - biology which led to a career practicing medicine in his chosen specialty, Neurology.

He devoted his working life to this challenge and never tired of trying to better understand the workings of the remarkable organ inside our skulls.

His analytical and problem solving skills were well suited to Neurology, and whilst working at the Northcott Neurological Centre in the early 1960s he observed 17 young children who presented with similar constellation of symptoms of dizziness, or vertigo.

In 1964 his paper on 'Benign Paroxysmal Vertigo of Childhood' was published in the prestigious journal Brain, and in subsequent papers on this condition published over many years he is credited as being the first person to observe and describe it.

Other papers of his to appear in the journal Brain at this time included one examining the link between epilepsy and migraine, in which he suggested there was a 'fundamental and intimate relation between migraine and epilepsy', a conclusion that was borne out by subsequent research.

With this passion never fading it seemed only natural that in his later years he became fascinated by the nature of consciousness, and devoured the literature relating to the research in this area.

For information about the handling of your personal information please refer to our Data Protection and Privacy Procedure and the relevant Data Protection and Privacy Collection Statement that applies to your interaction with us, available here.