October 17, 2012
AMHERST, Mass. — On Tuesday, Oct. 23, at 4:30 p.m. in the Pruyne Lecture Hall of Amherst College’s Fayerweather Hall, David Chalmers, visiting professor of philosophy at New York University, will present the eighth annual Amherst Lecture in Philosophy. Both his talk, titled “An Argument for Panpsychism,” and a reception following it are free and open to the public.
Each year, the Amherst Lecture in Philosophy brings a distinguished philosopher to Amherst College for a public lecture. The talk is subsequently published in what was Amherst’s first online journal, The Amherst Lecture in Philosophy (www.amherstlecture.org).
In addition to serving on the faculty at NYU, Chalmers holds the positions of Distinguished Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Centre for Consciousness at the Australian National University. He works in the area of the philosophy of mind and in the related areas of philosophy and cognitive science. He is interested in consciousness, the philosophy of mind and language, metaphysics and epistemology, and the foundations of cognitive science.
Chalmers studied mathematics at the University of Adelaide from 1983 to 1986 and at the University of Oxford from 1987 to 1988. He then studied at Indiana University in 1989, where he earned a Ph.D. in 1993 in philosophy and cognitive science. He went on to work at Washington University in St. Louis, the University of California Santa Cruz and the University of Arizona. He was one of the founders of the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness, and helped organize the biennial Tucson conferences on consciousness. He also edits the philosophy of mind series at Oxford University Press, and is the philosophy of mind editor for the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. He has written articles on consciousness, metaphysics and meaning, artificial intelligence and computation, and various other topics in philosophy and cognitive science.
Chalmers’ talk is organized by the Department of Philosophy and is made possible by the Forry and Micken Fund in Philosophy and Science, established in 1983 by John I. Forry ’66 and Carol Micken to promote the study of philosophical issues arising out of new developments in the sciences, including mathematics, and issues in the philosophy and history of science. For more information, visit www.amherstlecture.org or call 413-542-5805.
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