Brainstorms: Philosophical Essays on Mind and Psychology
(This collection of 17 essays by the author offers a compr...)
This collection of 17 essays by the author offers a comprehensive theory of mind, encompassing traditional issues of consciousness and free will. Using careful arguments and ingenious thought-experiments, the author exposes familiar preconceptions and hobbling institutions.
Elbow Room: The Varieties of Free Will Worth Wanting
(In this landmark 1984 work on free will, Daniel Dennett m...)
In this landmark 1984 work on free will, Daniel Dennett makes a case for compatibilism. His aim, as he writes in the preface to this new edition, was a cleanup job, "saving everything that mattered about the everyday concept of free will, while jettisoning the impediments." In Elbow Room, Dennett argues that the varieties of free will worth wanting – those that underwrite moral and artistic responsibility – are not threatened by advances in science but distinguished, explained and justified in detail.
(Content and Consciousness is an original and ground-break...)
Content and Consciousness is an original and ground-breaking attempt to elucidate a problem integral to the history of Western philosophical thought: the relationship of the mind and body. In this formative work, Dennett sought to develop a theory of the human mind and consciousness based on new and challenging advances in the field that came to be known as cognitive science. This important and illuminating work is widely-regarded as the book from which all of Dennett’s future ideas developed. It is his first explosive rebuttal of Cartesian dualism and one of the founding texts of philosophy of mind.
(Consciousness Explained is a full-scale exploration of hu...)
Consciousness Explained is a full-scale exploration of human consciousness. In this landmark book, Daniel Dennett refutes the traditional, commonsense theory of consciousness and presents a new model, based on a wealth of information from the fields of neuroscience, psychology, and artificial intelligence. Our current theories about conscious life-of people, animal, even robots – are transformed by the new perspectives found in this book.
(In Freedom Evolves, Dennett seeks to place ethics on the ...)
In Freedom Evolves, Dennett seeks to place ethics on the foundation it deserves: a realistic, naturalistic, potentially unified vision of our place in nature.
Sweet Dreams: Philosophical Obstacles to a Science of Consciousness
(In the years since Daniel Dennett's influential Conscious...)
In the years since Daniel Dennett's influential Consciousness Explained was published in 1991, scientific research on consciousness has been a hotly contested battleground of rival theories – "so rambunctious," Dennett observes, "that several people are writing books just about the tumult." With Sweet Dreams, Dennett returns to the subject for "revision and renewal" of his theory of consciousness, taking into account major empirical advances in the field since 1991 as well as recent theoretical challenges.
(One of today's most controversial and heated issues is wh...)
One of today's most controversial and heated issues is whether or not the conflict between science and religion can be reconciled. In Science and Religion: Are They Compatible?, renowned philosophers Daniel C. Dennett and Alvin Plantinga expand upon the arguments that they presented in an exciting live debate held at the 2009 American Philosophical Association Central Division conference.
(What is it like to be a preacher or rabbi who no longer b...)
What is it like to be a preacher or rabbi who no longer believes in God? In this expanded and updated edition of their groundbreaking study, Daniel C. Dennett and Linda LaScola comprehensively and sensitively expose an inconvenient truth that religious institutions face in the new transparency of the information age – the phenomenon of clergy who no longer believe what they publicly preach. In confidential interviews, clergy from across the ministerial spectrum – from liberal to literal – reveal how their lives of religious service and study have led them to a truth inimical to their professed beliefs and profession.
From Bacteria to Bach and Back: The Evolution of Minds
(In From Bacteria to Bach and Back, Daniel C. Dennett buil...)
In From Bacteria to Bach and Back, Daniel C. Dennett builds on recent discoveries from biology and computer science to show, step by step, how a comprehending mind could in fact have arisen from a mindless process of natural selection. A crucial shift occurred when humans developed the ability to share memes, or ways of doing things not based in genetic instinct. Competition among memes produced thinking tools powerful enough that our minds don’t just perceive and react, they create and comprehend.
Daniel Dennett is an American philosopher, educator, and writer. He serves as the Austin B. Fletcher Professor of Philosophy at Tufts University and also as the co-director of the Center for Cognitive Studies. Dennett is the author of such books as Brainstorms, Freedom Evolves and From Bacteria to Bach and Back.
Background
Daniel Dennett was born on March 28, 1942, in Boston, Massachusetts, United States. He is the son of Ruth Marjorie (née Leck) and Daniel Clement Dennett. Dennett has a sister.
Dennett spent part of his childhood in Lebanon. When he was five, his father died and his mother took him back to Massachusetts.
Education
Daniel Dennett attended Phillips Exeter Academy. After his graduation in 1959, he spent a year at Wesleyan University. After that, he studied at Harvard University where he received a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1963. He also attended the University of Oxford and received a Doctor of Philosophy degree in 1965.
Daniel Dennett started his career as a lecturer at Oxford College of Technology (now Oxford Brookes University) in 1964. In 1965, he took up a post of an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of California Irvine and in 1970 he was appointed an Associate Professor there. Dennett held this post until 1971 when he became an Associate Professor at Tufts University. In 1975, he became a full professor. He has also been serving as the Director of the Center for Cognitive Studies at Tufts University since 1980. He was the Co-founder and Co-director of the Curricular Software Studio at Tufts from 1985 to 1989.
Dennett was a Visiting Professor at Oxford University, the University of Pittsburgh, American University of Beirut Department of Philosophy and Harvard University. He visited Moscow and delivered a lecture at Moscow State University.
Daniel Dennett wrote his first book Brainstorms: Philosophical Essays on Mind and Psychology in 1981. Later he wrote such books as Content and Consciousness, Consciousness Explained, Freedom Evolves and many others. His latest book From Bacteria to Bach and Back was published in 2017. Dennett is a co-editor of The Rutherford Journal and an Associate Editor of Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience.
Daniel Dennett is called one of the Four Horsemen of New Atheism. He said that the centuries-old evolution of religious beliefs in people's minds has led many religious adherents to believe not in the original object of faith, that is, in God, but rather in religion itself as a combination of dogmas and rituals. Such people remain deaf to argumentation, not because their faith or love of God is strong, but because they have long ago transferred the responsibilities of understanding religion to the shoulders of the clergy and refused to analyze it at all.
Views
Daniel Dennett is a confirmed compatibilist. Since the late 60s of the 20th century, Daniel Dennett has been developing the theory of consciousness, known as the multiple project model. Dennett believes that all science, including the science of consciousness, is based on objective judgments and empirical data that are independent of the observer. He is a proponent of cognitive neuroscience and denies introspection-based methodology. To study consciousness, Dennett proposed his own methodology, which he called heterophenomenology. The explanation of human consciousness proposed by Dennett has no fundamental differences from the explanation of the behavior of a complex robot controlled by the programs laid down in it.
He defends a theory known by some as Neural Darwinism. Dennett sees evolution by natural selection as an algorithmic process. Dennett sees a danger in machines performing an ever-increasing proportion of basic tasks in perception, memory, and algorithmic computation because people may tend to anthropomorphize such systems and attribute intellectual powers to them that they do not possess. He believes the relevant danger from AI is that people will misunderstand the nature of basically "parasitic" AI systems, rather than employing them constructively to challenge and develop the human user's powers of comprehension.
Quotations:
"If you can approach the world's complexities, both its glories and its horrors, with an attitude of humble curiosity, acknowledging that however deeply you have seen, you have only scratched the surface, you will find worlds within worlds, beauties you could not heretofore imagine, and your own mundane preoccupations will shrink to proper size, not all that important in the greater scheme of things."
"What you can imagine depends on what you know."
"You don't get to advertise all the good that your religion does without first scrupulously subtracting all the harm it does and considering seriously the question of whether some other religion or no religion at all, does better."
"Not a single one of the cells that compose you know who you are, or cares."
"Go ahead and believe in God, if you like, but don't imagine that you have been given any grounds for such a belief by science."
"In fact, of course, science is an unparalleled playground of the imagination, populated by unlikely characters with wonderful names (messenger RNA, black holes, quarks) and capable of performing the most amazing deeds: sub-atomic whirling dervishes that can be in several places – everywhere and nowhere – at the same time; molecular hoop-snakes biting their own tails; self-copying spiral staircases bearing coded instructions; miniature keys searching for the locks in which they fit, on floating odysseys in a trillion synaptic gulfs."
Membership
Daniel Dennett is a member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, Academia Scientiarum et Artum Europaea, American Association for Artificial Intelligence, Cognitive Science Society, Memory Disorder Society, Freedom from Religion Foundation. He is a Fellow of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry and a Humanist Laureate of the International Academy of Humanism.
Society for Philosophy and Psychology
,
United States
1980 - 1981
American Philosophical Association
,
United States
1999 - 2000
Personality
Quotes from others about the person
Sam Harris: "The disagreement between Dan and myself is essentially this. We're living in a world where most people believe in Atlantis and they believe in the underwater kingdom and they read Plato closely, trying to figure out where it was. And I want to say Atlantis doesn't exist, it didn't exist, people are confused about Atlantis. Dan wants to say that Atlantis is really Sicily, and he'll give a whole argument about why Sicily answers to many of the claims that people are making about Atlantis. And I want to say, "No, they're still talking about being underwater. Sicily doesn't do that." And he says, "But Sicily is a great place and there's reasons to visit, and let's talk about Sicily." And when he and I argue about this, he begins to respond to me as though I'm saying Sicily doesn't exist. And so there's a fair amount of talking past one another in these kinds of debates. Of course Sicily exists, but the people who are talking about an underwater kingdom are, at the very least, confused, and that's the situation we're in with free will."
Interests
Philosophy of mind, cognitive science, philosophy of religion, sailing
Connections
Daniel Dennett married Susan Bell in 1962. The marriage produced two children.
Father:
Daniel Clement Dennett
Mother:
Ruth Marjorie Dennett
Sister:
Charlotte Dennett
Wife:
Susan Bell
Daughter:
Andrea Elizabeth Dennett
Son:
Peter Nathaniel Dennett
college:
Richard Dawkins
References
Third Culture: Beyond the Scientific Revolution
Brockman's thesis that science is emerging as the intellectual center of our society is brought to life vividly in The Third Culture, which weaves together the voices of some of today's most influential scientific figures, including: Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Dawkins on the implications of evolution Steven Pinker, Marvin Minsky, Daniel C. Dennett, and Roger Penrose on how the mind works.
1995
Dennett's Philosophy: A Comprehensive Assessment
The influential philosopher Daniel Dennett is best known for his distinctive theory of mental content, his elucidation of how the complex components of mental processing seem to come together in the relatively coherent narratives that we tell ourselves about ourselves and in his vivid accounts of how to think about minds in their evolutionary setting.
2000
On Dennett
This brief text assists students in understanding Dennett's philosophy and thinking so they can more fully engage in useful, intelligent class dialogue and improve their understanding of course content.