Born and raised near Doncaster in South Yorkshire, England, Frankish says he spent many hours alone reading due to childhood illness.
His heroes were the cricketer Geoff Boycott, the fictional aviator Biggles, and the zoologist and humorous author Gerald Durrell.
His PhD thesis, which was supervised by Peter Carruthers and Chris Hookway, "distinguished two types of belief and argued for a two-level framework for folk psychology.
"[3] While at Sheffield he held a Temporary Lectureship in the Philosophy Department, teaching courses in mind, language, and action and was closely involved in the work of the Hang Seng Centre for Cognitive Studies.
[5] In 2021, he and Philip Goff, a colleague who defends the opposing view of panpsychism, started the YouTube channel "Mind Chat" on which they interview significant scientists and philosophers of consciousness, such as Tim O'Connor, Janet Levin, Christof Koch, Anil Seth, and Helen Yetter-Chappell.
"[2] Early in his career he took a “robustly materialist stance” and attempted to rebut the zombie argument popularized by David Chalmers.
[8][9] In 2016 he wrote a target article for a special issue of the Journal of Consciousness Studies, which included many responses by both supporters and critics of the position.
[10] In 2019, William Ramsey summarized the eliminative materialist argument thusly: What is real are quasi-phenomenal properties—the non-phenomenal properties of inner states that are detected by introspection and misrepresented as phenomenal.
They reject the view that it consists in private mental qualities and argue that it involves being related to the world through a web of informational sensitivities and reactions.
In the category of "opponents" he included thinkers such as Katalin Balog, Philip Goff, Martine Nida-Rümelin, and Jesse Prinz.