Philip Goff is Professor of Philosophy at Durham University. His research focuses on consciousness and the ultimate nature of reality. Goff is also the author of Galileo's Error: Foundations for a New Science of Consciousness (Pantheon 2019), Why? The Purpose of the Universe (OUP 2024), and co-editor of Is Consciousness Everywhere? Essays on Panpsychism (Imprint Academic, 2022). Goff has published many academic articles, as well as writing extensively for newspapers and magazines, including Scientific American, The Guardian, Aeon, and the Times Literary Supplement.

• 1. The reality of consciousness


• Part I: Against physicalism


• 2. What is physicalism?


• 3. The knowledge argument


• 4. The conceivability argument


• 5. Revelation and the transparency argument


• Part II: Russellian monism: An alternative


• 6. The elegant solution


• 7. Panpsychism versus panprotopsychism, and the subject-summing problem


• 8. Top-down combination problems


• 9. A conscious universe


• 10. Analytic phenomenology: A metaphysical manifesto

In Consciousness and Fundamental Reality, Philip Goff argues that physicalist views cannot account for the evident reality of conscious experience, and hence that physicalism cannot be true. He argues that there are big problems with the most well-known arguments against physicalism and proposes significant modifications. He then explores and defends a theory of fundamental reality known as 'Russellian monism.' Russell argued that physics, for all its virtues, gives us a radically incomplete picture of the world and tells us only about the extrinsic, mathematical features of material entities, and not how they are in and of themselves. Following Russell, Goff's version of Russellian monism argues that it is this "hidden" intrinsic nature of matter that explains human and animal consciousness.