Arnold Stuart Zuboff (born January 2, 1946) is an American philosopher. He lectured at the UCL Department of Philosophy from 1974 until his retirement in 2011. His work has covered personal identity, the philosophy of mind, ethics, metaphysics, epistemology, and the philosophy of probability.
Zuboff is the original formulator of the Sleeping Beauty problem. He has also argued for a view of personal identity that he calls "universalism", according to which the apparent separation between oneself and other conscious beings is an illusion of perspective.
Early life and education Zuboff was born on January 2, 1946. He was raised in West Hartford, Connecticut.
Zuboff received a B.A. in philosophy from the University of Connecticut in 1968, and attended Princeton University Graduate School until 1972. In 2009, he defended his thesis, Time, Self, and Sleeping Beauty, under the supervision of Thomas Nagel. His examiners were Gilbert Harman, Adam Elga, John P. Burgess, Alexander Nehamas, and Nagel.
Career Zuboff lectured at the UCL Department of Philosophy from 1974 until his retirement in 2011. As of 2020, he was an Honorary Senior Research Associate at UCL.
Philosophy Zuboff has worked on personal identity, the philosophy of mind, ethics, metaphysics, epistemology, and the philosophy of probability. He is the original formulator of the Sleeping Beauty problem.
Universalism In "One Self: The Logic of Experience" (1990), Zuboff set out a view of personal identity that he calls "universalism". On this view, the apparent boundary between oneself and other conscious beings is an illusion of perspective. Zuboff argues that every conscious experience is experienced as "mine" from within it, and that there is no further objective fact that makes one organism, rather than another, the single subject who is "I".
In "An Introduction to Universalism", Zuboff described the view as the claim that "all the experience in all the separate nervous systems of the world is yours", while each experience appears to be the whole of what is one's own. Elizabeth R. Valentine describes Zuboff as having reached the conclusion, by a non-mystical route, that there is no division between self and others, and that universalism holds that "we are all one person: there is only one".
In 2025, Zuboff released his monograph, entitled Finding Myself: Beyond the False Boundaries of Personal Identity, as a free digital publication under a Creative Commons license.
Personal life
Zuboff was a close friend of the Canadian philosopher G. A. Cohen, with whom he discussed philosophy.
Selected works Books Finding Myself: Beyond the False Boundaries of Personal Identity
The Philosophical High Ground: Our World through the Eyes of Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Locke, Berkeley, Hume and Kant. 2015. doi:10.13140/RG.2.1.4642.8643.
Articles
Book Chapters
Videos
See also The Mind's I, a collection of essays on philosophy of mind, edited by Douglas Hofstadter and Daniel Dennett, in which Zuboff's short story "The Story of a Brain" is featured
References
External links
Arnold Zuboff at PhilPeople Arnold Zuboff at ResearchGate Arnold Zuboff at University College London
Arnold Zuboff Art