Robert Kirk (philosopher)
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Robert Kirk (born 1933) is an emeritus
professor Professor (commonly abbreviated as Prof.) is an academic rank at universities and other post-secondary education and research institutions in most countries. Literally, ''professor'' derives from Latin as a "person who professes". Professors ...
in the Department of Philosophy at the
University of Nottingham , mottoeng = A city is built on wisdom , established = 1798 – teacher training college1881 – University College Nottingham1948 – university status , type = Public , chancellor ...
. He is known for his work on philosophical zombies—putatively unconscious beings physically and behaviourally identical to human beings. Although Kirk did not invent this idea, he introduced the term ''zombie'' in his 1974 papers "Sentience and Behaviour" and "Zombies v. Materialists". In the latter he offered a formulation of physicalism that aimed to make clear that if zombies are possible, physicalism is false: an argument that was not much noticed until David Chalmers's development of it in ''The Conscious Mind''. Kirk himself had reversed his position earlier, and has argued against the zombie idea in a number of books and articles on physicalism and consciousness. As well as working on other topics in the philosophy of mind, Kirk has published on the question of how far translation and interpretation are determined by objective facts (see W. V. Quine's ''Word and Object'' (1960)). His own book on this topic, ''Translation Determined'', appeared in 1986. Another main interest is relativism.


Selected bibliography

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References


External links


Robert Kirk
home page at the
University of Nottingham , mottoeng = A city is built on wisdom , established = 1798 – teacher training college1881 – University College Nottingham1948 – university status , type = Public , chancellor ...

Zombies
entry in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
publisher's webpage about "Robots, Zombies and Us"
1933 births Living people Academics of the University of Nottingham Philosophers of mind 21st-century British philosophers {{England-philosopher-stub