Rare feat for Australian scholar

A flood of congratulation emails and messages on Facebook last Friday morning was the first Distinguished Professor David Chalmers knew that he had joined a select group of Australian academics.

Professor Chalmers is only the third ANU academic and 15^th Australian academic to be elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

“I was especially pleased to be elected along with two other Australian philosophers with ANU connections: Michael Smith (now at Princeton) and Rae Langton (now at Cambridge University), both formerly from ANU.

Only four members were elected from philosophy this year and it's nice for ANU to be able to claim three of them. I think the three of us are the first Australian members in philosophy in some years,” says Professor Chalmers.

The American Academy of Arts and Sciences is an independent policy research center that conducts multidisciplinary studies of complex and emerging problems. Founded in 1870, the academy’s elected members are leaders in the academic disciplines, the arts, business, and public affairs.

Professor Chalmers, who is from the school of Philosophy, is also director of the Centre for Consciousness. Earlier this year he was named by Philosophy Now as the second most influential philosopher in the world.

He is also co-director of the Center for Mind, Brain, and Consciousness at New York University.

Professor Chalmers is especially interested in consciousness and also in artificial intelligence and computation, in philosophical issues about meaning and possibility and in the foundations of cognitive science and of physics. He joined the Research School of Social Sciences as a Federation Fellow in August 2004 to establish the Centre for Consciousness.