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.

Career

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.

Achievements

• Daniel Dennett is an American philosopher, writer, and educator who is famous as the author of over four hundred scholarly articles and books on various aspects of the mind. He is a major contributor to the understanding of the conceptual foundations of evolutionary biology. His most famous books are Brainstorms, Freedom Evolves and Science and Religion.
  
  Daniel Dennett won the Barwise Prize in 2004. He also received the Richard Dawkins Prize, Distinguished Fellow Award and Bertrand Russell Society Award. In 2012, Dennett received the Erasmus Prize. He won the Carl Sagan Award on November 8th, 2018.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Sweet Dreams: Philosophical Obstacles to a Science of Consciousness

    (In the years since Daniel Dennett's influential Conscious...)

    2005
  • Content and Consciousness

    (Content and Consciousness is an original and ground-break...)

    1986
  • Freedom Evolves

    (In Freedom Evolves, Dennett seeks to place ethics on the ...)

    2003
  • Caught in the Pulpit: Leaving Belief Behind

    (What is it like to be a preacher or rabbi who no longer b...)

    2013
  • Brainstorms: Philosophical Essays on Mind and Psychology

    (This collection of 17 essays by the author offers a compr...)

    1981
  • Science and Religion: Are They Compatible?

    (One of today's most controversial and heated issues is wh...)

    2010
  • Elbow Room: The Varieties of Free Will Worth Wanting

    (In this landmark 1984 work on free will, Daniel Dennett m...)

    1984
  • Consciousness Explained

    (Consciousness Explained is a full-scale exploration of hu...)

    1992
  • From Bacteria to Bach and Back: The Evolution of Minds

    (In From Bacteria to Bach and Back, Daniel C. Dennett buil...)

    2017
  • Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon 2006

Religion

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.
  2000