Robert Kirk (born 1933)[1] is a British philosopher.
He is emeritus professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Nottingham.
[3] 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.
[4] Kirk himself had reversed his position earlier,[5] and has argued against the zombie idea in a number of books and articles on physicalism and consciousness.
[6][7][8][9][10] 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)).