Daniel Clement Dennett (born March 28 1942 in
Boston, Massachusetts) is a prominent American philosopher whose research centers on philosophy of mind, philosophy of science and
philosophy of biology, particularly as those fields relate to evolutionary biology and cognitive science. Dennett is
currently the Director of the Center for Cognitive Studies and the Austin B. Fletcher Professor of Philosophy at Tufts University. Dennett is also a noted atheist and advocate of the
brights movement.[1]
Biography
Dennett spent part of his childhood in Beirut, where, during World War II, his father, a counter-intelligence agent with the Office of Strategic Services, had a cover job at the American
Legation. The young Dennett and family returned to Massachusetts in 1947 after his father died in an unexplained plane
crash.[2][3]
He attended Phillips Exeter Academy, and received his B.A. in philosophy from Harvard University in 1963, where
he was a student of W.V. Quine. In 1965, he received his D.Phil. in philosophy from Christ Church, Oxford,
where he studied under the ordinary language philosopher Gilbert Ryle. While at Oxford,
Dennett has claimed,[4] he introduced the first
frisbee to the United Kingdom. Dennett is currently
(May 2007) the Austin B. Fletcher Professor of Philosophy, University Professor, and Co-Director of the Center for Cognitive
Studies (with Ray Jackendoff) at Tufts
University.
Dennett describes himself as "an autodidact — or, more properly, the beneficiary of
hundreds of hours of informal tutorials on all the fields that interest me, from some of the world's leading scientists."[3]
Daniel Dennett in
Tahiti in 1984
Dennett gave the John Locke lectures at the University of Oxford in 1983, the Gavin David Young Lectures at Adelaide, Australia, in 1985, and
the Tanner Lecture at Michigan in 1986, among many others. In 2001 he was awarded the Jean
Nicod Prize and gave the Jean Nicod Lectures in Paris. He has received two
Guggenheim Fellowships, a Fulbright Fellowship,
and a Fellowship at the Center for Advanced Studies in Behavioral Science. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1987. He was the co-founder (1985) and
co-director of the Curricular Software Studio at Tufts University, and has helped to
design museum exhibits on computers for the Smithsonian Institution, the Museum
of Science in Boston, and the Computer Museum in Boston. He is a Humanist Laureate of the International Academy of Humanism and a Fellow of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry. He is also an avid sailor.
In October 2006, Dennett was hospitalized due to a dissection of the
aorta. After a nine-hour surgery, he was given a new aorta and aortic arch. As of November, he was
recuperating from the surgery. In an essay posted on the Edge website, Dennett gives his
firsthand account of his health problems, his consequent feelings of gratitude towards the scientists and doctors whose hard work
made his recovery possible, and his complete lack of a "deathbed
conversion".[5]
Philosophical views
Dennett has remarked in several places (such as "Self-portrait", in Brainchildren) that his overall philosophical
project has remained largely the same since his time at Oxford. He is primarily concerned with providing a philosophy of mind that is grounded in empirical research. In his
original dissertation, Content and Consciousness, he broke up the problem of explaining
the mind into the need for a theory of content and for a theory of consciousness. His approach to this project has also stayed
true to this distinction. Just as Content and Consciousness has a bipartite structure, he similarly divided
Brainstorms into two sections. He would later collect several essays on content in The Intentional Stance and
synthesize his views on consciousness into a unified theory in Consciousness
Explained. These volumes respectively form the most extensive development of his views, and he frequently refers back
to them in subsequent writings.
In Consciousness Explained, Dennett's interest in the ability of evolution to explain some of the content-producing
features of consciousness is already apparent, and this has since become an integral part of his program. He defends a theory
known by some as Neural Darwinism. He also presents an argument against
qualia; he argues that the concept is so confused that it cannot be put to any use or understood
in any non-contradictory way, and therefore does not constitute a valid refutation of physicalism. Much of Dennett's work in the 1990s has been concerned with fleshing out his previous ideas by
addressing the same topics from an evolutionary standpoint, from what distinguishes human minds from animal minds (Kinds of
Minds), to how free will is compatible with a naturalist view of the world (Freedom
Evolves). His most recent book, Breaking the Spell, is an attempt
to subject religious belief to the same treatment, explaining possible evolutionary reasons for the phenomenon of religious
adherence.
While it is clear that Dennett does not subscribe to a number of categories (such as Cartesian materialism and Dualism), it is less clear which ones
he fits into. As Dennett himself puts it:
[Others] note that my 'avoidance of the standard philosophical terminology for discussing such matters' often creates problems
for me; philosophers have a hard time figuring out what I am saying and what I am denying. My refusal to play ball with my
colleagues is deliberate, of course, since I view the standard philosophical terminology as worse than useless — a major obstacle
to progress since it consists of so many errors.
– Daniel Dennett, The Message is: There is no Medium
Dennett self-identifies with a few terms. In Consciousness Explained, he admits "I am a sort of 'teleofunctionalist', of course, perhaps the original teleofunctionalist'". He goes on
to say, "I am ready to come out of the closet as a sort of verificationalist". In
Breaking the Spell he admits to being "a
bright", and defends the term on several occasions. A "qualophile" is Daniel Dennett's nickname for any philosopher who
believes in the reality of qualia.
Role in evolutionary debate
Dennett's views on evolution are identified as being strongly adaptationist, in line
with the views of ethologist Richard Dawkins. In
Darwin's Dangerous Idea, Dennett showed himself even more willing than
Dawkins to defend adaptationism in print, devoting an entire chapter to a criticism of the views of paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould. This stems from Gould's
long-running public debate with E. O. Wilson and other evolutionary biologists over human
sociobiology and its descendant evolutionary
psychology, which Gould, Richard Lewontin, and John Maynard Smith opposed, but which Dennett advocated, together with Dawkins and Steven Pinker.[6] Dennett's debate
with Gould has led to some backlash from Gould and his supporters, who allege that Dennett overstated his claims and
misrepresented Gould's.[7]
Dennett has also written about and advocated the notion of memetics.
References
- ^ "The Bright Stuff" New York Times Essay reprinted on The Brights website.; see also [1][2][3][4][5] for
descriptions of Dennett as an atheist.
- ^ "The semantic engineer", by Andrew Brown; 17 April 2004
- ^ a b Dennett, Daniel C. [08
2004] (2005-09-13). "What I Want to Be When I Grow Up", in John Brockman:
Curious Minds: How a Child Becomes
a Scientist. New York: Vintage Books. ISBN 1-4000-7686-2.
- ^ The semantic engineer, Guardian Unlimited Books, April 17 2004 http://books.guardian.co.uk/departments/politicsphilosophyandsociety/story/0,6000,1193371,00.html
- ^ 'Thank Goodness!', edge 195, Nov. 3, 2006
- ^ Although Dennett has expressed criticism of human sociobiology, calling it
a form of "greedy reductionism," he is generally sympathetic towards the
explanations proposed by evolutionary psychology. Gould also is not one sided,
and writes: "Sociobiologists have broadened their range of selective stories by invoking concepts of inclusive fitness and kin selection to solve (successfully I
think) the vexatious problem of altruism—previously the greatest stumbling block to a Darwinian theory of social behavior. . . .
Here sociobiology has had and will continue to have success. And here I wish it well. For it represents an extension of basic
Darwinism to a realm where it should apply." Gould, 1980. "Sociobiology and the Theory of Natural Selection" In G. W. Barlow and J. Silverberg, eds., Sociobiology:
Beyond Nature/Nurture? Boulder CO: Westview Press, pp. 257-269.
- ^ 'Evolution: The pleasures of Pluralism' — Stephen Jay Gould's review of Darwin's Dangerous Idea
Partial bibliography
- Brainstorms: Philosophical Essays on Mind and Psychology (MIT Press
1981) (ISBN 0-262-54037-1)
- Elbow Room: The Varieties of Free Will Worth Wanting (MIT Press 1984) — on free will and determinism (ISBN
0-262-04077-8)
- The Mind's I (Bantam, Reissue edition 1985, with
Douglas Hofstadter) (ISBN 0-553-34584-2)
- Content and Consciousness (Routledge & Kegan Paul Books Ltd; 2nd ed edition January 1986) (ISBN
0-7102-0846-4)
- The Intentional Stance (MIT Press; reprint edition 1989) (ISBN 0-262-54053-3)
- Consciousness Explained (Back Bay Books 1992) (ISBN 0-316-18066-1)
- Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life (Simon
& Schuster; Reprint edition 1996) (ISBN 0-684-82471-X)
- Kinds of Minds: Towards an Understanding of Consciousness (Basic Books 1997) (ISBN 0-465-07351-4)
- Brainchildren: Essays on Designing Minds (Representation and Mind) (MIT Press 1998) (ISBN 0-262-04166-9) — A
Collection of Essays 1984–1996
- Freedom Evolves (Viking Press 2003) (ISBN
0-670-03186-0)
- Sweet Dreams: Philosophical Obstacles to a Science of Consciousness (Jean Nicod Lectures) (Bradford Books 2005) (ISBN
0-262-04225-8)
- Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon (Penguin Group 2006)
(ISBN 0-670-03472-X)
- Dove nascono le idee", Di Renzo Editore, 2006, Italy
- Neuroscience and Philosophy: Brain, Mind, and Language (Columbia University Press, New York, 2007) (ISBN
978-0-231-14044-7), co-authored with Maxwell Bennett, Peter Hacker, and John Searle
Texts on Dennett
- "Dennett: Reconciling Science and Our Self-Conception" Matthew Elton (Polity Press, 2003) (ISBN 0-7456-2117-1)
- Daniel Dennett edited by Andrew Brook and Don Ross (Cambridge University Press 2000) (ISBN 0-521-00864-6)
- Dennett's Philosophy: A Comprehensive Assessment edited by Don Ross, Andrew Brook and David Thompson (MIT Press 2000)
(ISBN 0-262-18200-9)
- Dennett, among others, is discussed in John Brockman's The Third
Culture.
- On Dennett John Symons (Wadsworth Publishing Company 2000) (ISBN 0-534-57632-X)
- Dennett is mentioned on numerous occasions in David J. Chalmers' The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory, as Chalmers discusses his theory (ISBN
0-19-511789-1).
- Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience, P. Hacker and M.R. Bennett
(Blackwell, Oxford, and Malden, Mass., 2003) (ISBN 1-4051-0855-X) has an appendix devoted to a strong critique of Dennett's
philosophy of mind
Select quote
The first stable conclusion I reached … was that the only thing brains could do was to approximate the responsivity to
meanings that we presuppose in our everyday mentalistic discourse. When mechanical push comes to shove, a brain was always going
to do what it was caused to do by current, local, mechanical circumstances, whatever it ought to do, whatever a God's-eye view
might reveal about the actual meaning of its current states. But over the long haul, brains could be designed — by
evolutionary processes — to do the right thing (from the point of view of meaning) with high
reliability. … [B]rains are syntactic engines that can mimic the
competence of semantic engines. … The appreciation of meanings — their discrimination and
delectation — is central to our vision of consciousness, but this conviction that I, on the inside, deal directly with meanings
turns out to be something rather like a benign 'user-illusion.'
– Daniel Dennett, Brainchildren
See also
External links
Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to:
General pages
Interviews and biographies
- 'The Semantic Engineer' — a biographical essay from The Guardian, April
17, 2004.
- The Philosophers Magazine:
Philosopher of the Month, April 2003: Dan Dennett
- Radio interview about
Intelligent Design on Philosophy Talk, January 2006.
- Interview with Dennett at Monsters and
Critics
- Article
about Dennett's naturalistic worldview from the New York Times, July 2003
- Pulling Our Own Strings —
Reason magazine interviews Dennett.
- Video
interview with Robert Wright at MeaningOfLife.tv
- The Atheism Tapes, program 6,
transcript of an extended interview with Dennett for the Jonathan Miller BBC TV series,
2004.
- Point of Inquiry, March 10,
2006 audio interview with Daniel Dennett on "Breaking the Spell".
- A Glorious Accident: Understanding Our Place in the Cosmic Puzzle, a PBS documentary and book interviewing 6 leading
thinkers, Dennett among them. [6][7]
Reviews
Other
| Persondata |
| NAME |
Dennett, Daniel |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES |
Dennett, Dan |
| SHORT DESCRIPTION |
American philosopher |
| DATE OF BIRTH |
March 28 1942 (1942--) (age 65) |
| PLACE OF BIRTH |
Boston, Massachusetts |
| DATE OF DEATH |
|
| PLACE OF DEATH |
|
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