Daniel Dennett

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Western Philosophy
20th-century philosophy
Name: Daniel Dennett
Birth: March 28, 1942
School/tradition: Analytic Philosophy
Main interests: philosophy of mind, philosophy of biology, philosophy of science
Notable ideas: Heterophenomenology
Influences: Gilbert Ryle, W.V.O. Quine

Daniel Clement Dennett (b. March 28, 1942 in Boston, Massachusetts), is a prominent American philosopher. Dennett's 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 a Humanist Laureate of the International Academy of Humanism and a Fellow of the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal.

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[edit] Biography

Daniel Dennett 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 University of Oxford, where he studied under the natural-language philosopher Gilbert Ryle. Dennett is currently (August 2005) the Austin B. Fletcher Professor of Philosophy, University Professor, and Co-Director of the Center for Cognitive Studies (with Ray Jackendoff) at Tufts University.

Daniel Dennett in Tahiti in 1984
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Daniel Dennett in Tahiti in 1984

He 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 also an avid sailor.

Dennett 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). Dennett is also well known for his argument against qualia; he 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.

[edit] 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 which is grounded in and fruitful to 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.

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 discussed:

[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 will self-identify 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.

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. Much of his 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 groups.

[edit] 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 has led to some backlash from Gould and his supporters, who allege that Dennett overstated his claims and misrepresented Gould's. [1]

[edit] Health

In October 2006, Dennett was rushed by ambulance to a hospital where it was determined by CT scan that he had a dissection of the aorta. After a nine-hour surgery, he was given a new aorta and aortic arch, made of strong Dacron fabric tubing sewn and attached to his heart by a carbon-fiber valve. As of November, he was recuperating from 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" [2].

[edit] Partial bibliography

[edit] 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).

[edit] 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

[edit] See also

[edit] External links

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to:

[edit] References

  1. ^ 'Evolution: The pleasures of Pluralism'- Stephen Jay Gould's review of Darwin's Dangerous Idea
  2. ^ 'Thank Goodness!', edge 195, Nov. 3, 2006
Persondata
NAME Dennett, Daniel
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Dennett, Dan
SHORT DESCRIPTION American philosopher
DATE OF BIRTH March 28, 1942
PLACE OF BIRTH Boston, Massachusetts
DATE OF DEATH
PLACE OF DEATH
Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org../../../d/a/n/Daniel_Dennett_375e.html"