Daniel Dennett

Daniel Clement Dennett (Boston, 1942 – Portland, Maine, 2024) was an American philosopher whose work focused on the philosophy of mind, the philosophy of science and the philosophy of biology, especially as these fields relate to evolutionary biology and cognitive science. Within analytic philosophy, he was one of the most widely read and debated thinkers of his generation on consciousness, intentionality, artificial intelligence and the evolution of ideas.

He was born in Boston into a family shaped by war. His father, who held a doctorate in Islamic studies, worked in Beirut as a covert agent of the Office of Strategic Services during the Second World War, and died in a plane crash in Ethiopia in 1947. His mother, an English teacher, took him back to Massachusetts. He studied at Phillips Exeter Academy and took his degree in philosophy at Harvard in 1963, where he was a student of Willard Van Orman Quine. He then earned his doctorate at Oxford in 1965 under Gilbert Ryle. After teaching at the University of California, Irvine, from 1965 to 1971, he moved to Tufts University, where he spent five decades and directed the Center for Cognitive Studies.

According to his own account, his philosophical project stayed largely the same from his years at Oxford: to build a philosophy of mind grounded in empirical research. His dissertation split the problem of the mind into two questions, content and consciousness, and that distinction guided much of his work. Brainstorms (1978) gathered essays on these issues, The Intentional Stance developed his theory of content, and Consciousness Explained (1991) offered a unified theory of consciousness. In that book he defended materialism: mental states, consciousness included, result entirely from physical processes in the brain, and Cartesian dualism is rejected. His multiple drafts model describes consciousness as streams of information competing for influence in the brain, and his image of the "Joycean machine" treats it as a serial software layer of language and habits running on the parallel hardware of the brain. On this view the self is a "center of narrative gravity", a useful fiction the brain builds to make sense of its own behaviour.

He also argued against qualia in the traditional sense, claiming the concept is so confused that it cannot be used or understood in a non-contradictory way. The position was widely disputed, and neuroscientists such as Gerald Edelman, Antonio Damasio and Rodolfo Llinás rejected it. In the 1990s he extended his work to evolution: Kinds of Minds examined the difference between animal and human minds, and Freedom Evolves argued that free will is compatible with a naturalistic view of the world. In Breaking the Spell he treated religion as a natural phenomenon, and in Darwin's Dangerous Idea he defended an algorithmic reading of natural selection against the pluralism of Stephen Jay Gould.

His compatibilism appears in a two-stage model of decision making, in which a generator of considerations produces options in a partly indeterminate way, and a process of reasoning selects and weighs them. Dennett defended it against libertarians on the grounds that chance placed there is compatible with the agent's responsibility.

His influence reaches the philosophy of mind, evolutionary psychology and public debate about religion. He was counted among the "Four Horsemen" of New Atheism, alongside Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens, and his work remains a reference for those who try to explain the mind scientifically.