Daniel Dennett

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Daniel Clement Dennett (born 1942) is an American philosopher, and a leading figure in philosophy of mind and philosophy of science, particularly as those fields relate to evolutionary biology and cognitive science. He is presently (2003) employed as Austin B. Fletcher Professor of Philosophy and director of the Center for Cognitive Studies at Tufts University.

Dennett's research centres on the philosophy of the mind and cognitive science. He is the author of several major books on evolution and consciousness. He is a leading proponent of the theory known by some as Neural Darwinism (see also greedy reductionism).

He is also well known for his argument against qualia, which claims 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. This argument was presented most comprehensively in his book Consciousness Explained.

Table of contents

1 Selected works
2 Quotation
3 See also
4 External links

Selected works

The Mind's I (Bantam, Reissue edition 1985, with Douglas Hofstadter) (ISBN 0553345842)
Elbow Room (MIT Press 1984) - on free will and determinism (ISBN 0262040778)
The Intentional Stance (MIT Press; Reprint edition 1989) (ISBN 0262540533)
Consciousness Explained (Back Bay Books 1992) (ISBN 0316180661)
Darwin's Dangerous Idea (Simon & Schuster; Reprint edition 1996) ISBN 068482471X
Brain Children: A collection of Essays (MIT Press, 1998)
Freedom Evolves (Viking Press 2003) (ISBN 0670031860)

Dennett, among others, is discussed in John Brockman's The Third Culture.

Quotation

A quote from Chapter 25 of Brain Children that is fundamental to understanding Dennett's work:

"The first stable conclusion I reached ÃÂÃÂ 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. ÃÂÃÂ [B]rains are syntactic engines that can mimic the competence of semantic engines. ÃÂÃÂ 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".

External links

This article is part of The Contemporary Philosophers series

Analytic philosophers:

Continental philosophers:

Jean Baudrillard | Jacques Derrida