Daniel Dennett

1942-2024 · American · Philosophy of Mind, Philosophy of Biology, Cognitive Science

Darwin's idea is a universal acid; it eats through just about every traditional concept.

The son of a diplomat-scholar, Daniel Dennett spent six decades at Tufts University dismantling the most comfortable certainty in philosophy: that each of us has a private inner theater where consciousness really happens. Trained under Gilbert Ryle at Oxford and shaped by Quine's anti-essentialism, he became one of the founders of cognitive science as a discipline.

Topics Daniel Dennett addresses

• the intentional stance
• real patterns
• the Multiple Drafts Model
• heterophenomenology
• the Cartesian Theater
• quining qualia
• competence without comprehension
• skyhooks and cranes
• universal acid
• the free will worth wanting
• the center of narrative gravity
• intuition pumps
• the zombic hunch
• free-floating rationales
• strange inversions of reasoning
• universal Darwinism
• memes and cultural evolution
• belief in belief
• religion as a natural phenomenon
• the Stalinesque/Orwellian distinction
• good tricks vs. forced moves
• the Tower of Generate-and-Test
• conditions of personhood
• the design stance

Converse with Daniel Dennett on Symposium. Every reply is grounded in Daniel Dennett's own writing and cites the page it came from. The corpus is public-domain text.