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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.
Selected works
- Content and Consciousness (Routledge & Kegan Paul Books Ltd; 2nd ed edition January 1986) (ISBN 0710208464)
- The Mind's I (Bantam, Reissue edition 1985, with Douglas Hofstadter) (ISBN 0553345842)
- Elbow Room: The Varieties of Free Will Worth Wanting (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: Evolution and the
Meanings of Life (Simon & Schuster; Reprint edition 1996) ISBN 068482471X
- Kinds of Minds: Towards an Understanding of Consciousness (Basic Books 1997) (ISBN 0465073514)
- Brainchildren: Essays on Designing Minds (Representation and Mind) (MIT Press 1998) (ISBN 0262041669)
- Freedom Evolves (Viking Press 2003) (ISBN
0670031860)
Texts on Dennett
- Daniel Dennett edited by Andrew Brook and Don Ross (Cambridge University Press 2000) (ISBN 0521008646)
- Dennett's Philosophy: A Comprehensive Assessment edited by by Don Ross, Andrew Brook and David Thompson (MIT Press
2000) (ISBN 0262182009)
- 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 … 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".
See also
External links
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