Prof. David Papineau

Professor of Philosophy of Science, King's College London

David Papineau was educated in Trinidad, England, and South Africa. He has a BSc in mathematics from the University of Natal and a BA in philosophy from Cambridge. He stayed at Cambridge to work on conceptual change in science under Ian Hacking, and was awarded his PhD in 1974. Since then he has lectured at Reading University, Macquarie University, Birkbeck College London, and Cambridge University. He went to King's College as Professor of Philosophy of Science in 1990.

Papineau works on issues in metaphysics, philosophy of science, and the philosophy of mind and psychology. He has written For Science in the Social Sciences (1978), Theory and Meaning (1979), Reality and Representation (1987), Philosophical Naturalism (1993) and Introducing Consciousness (2000), and he edited Philosophy of Science (1996) and Teleosemantics (2006). His Thinking about Consciousness was published in 2002 and The Roots of Reason, a collection of essays on rationality, decision, and evolution, in 2003.

Papineau was President of the British Society for the Philosophy of Science from 1993 to 1995 and Editor of the British Journal for the Philosophy of Science from 1993 to 1998. In 1999-2000 he was a Leverhulme Research Fellow and in 2007 a Mind Fellow. He will be President of the Mind Association for 2009-10.