Daniel Dennett
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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"From what can "ought" be derived? The most compelling answer is this: ethics must be somehow based on an appreciation of human nature — on a sense of what a human being is or might be, and on what a human being might want to have or want to be. If that is naturalism, then naturalism is no fallacy."--Darwin's Dangerous Idea (1995) by Daniel Dennett "If you see a magician sawing a lady in half and you wanna know how it's done, and somebody says, "Well, I'll tell you how it's done. They don't really saw the lady in half. They just make it appear that they're sawing the lady in half." And you say, "Yeah, okay, great. How do they do that?" "Oh, that's not my department. That's somebody else's job. I've already given you my explanation." Sometimes philosophers give answers like that. I think they just don't wanna be bothered. They don't wanna take on the responsibility to explain what's actually happening. --The 4 biggest ideas in philosophy, with Daniel Dennett on Big Think "We're awash in toxic memes right now. One of the most toxic, I think because it enables so many others, is the idea that truth doesn't matter, that truth is just relative, that there's no such thing as establishing the truth of anything. Your truth, my truth, we're all entitled to our own truths. That's pernicious, it's attractive to many people, and it is used to exploit people in all sorts of nefarious ways. The truth really does matter." --The 4 biggest ideas in philosophy, with Daniel Dennett on Big Think |
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Daniel Dennett (1942 - 2024) is an American philosopher known for books such as Darwin's Dangerous Idea (1996).
Dennett is an atheist and secularist, as well as an outspoken supporter of the Brights movement. Dennett is referred to as one of the "Four Horsemen of New Atheism".
Selected works
- Brainstorms: Philosophical Essays on Mind and Psychology (MIT Press 1981)
- Elbow Room: The Varieties of Free Will Worth Wanting (MIT Press 1984) – on free will and determinism
- Content and Consciousness (Routledge & Kegan Paul Books Ltd; 2nd ed. 1986)
- Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life (Simon & Schuster; reprint edition 1996)
- Kinds of Minds: Towards an Understanding of Consciousness (Basic Books 1997)
- Brainchildren: Essays on Designing Minds (Representation and Mind) (MIT Press 1998) – A Collection of Essays 1984–1996
- Sweet Dreams: Philosophical Obstacles to a Science of Consciousness (MIT Press 2005)
- Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon (Penguin Group 2006).
- Neuroscience and Philosophy: Brain, Mind, and Language (Columbia University Press 2007)), co-authored with Max Bennett, Peter Hacker, and John Searle
- Science and Religion: Are They Compatible? (Oxford University Press 2010), co-authored with Alvin Plantinga
- Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking (W. W. Norton & Company 2013)
- Caught in the Pulpit: Leaving Belief Behind (Pitchstone Publishing – 2013) co-authored with Linda LaScola
- Inside Jokes: Using Humor to Reverse-Engineer the Mind (MIT Press – 2011), co-authored with Matthew M. Hurley and Reginald B. Adams Jr.
- From Bacteria to Bach and Back: The Evolution of Minds (W. W. Norton & Company – 2017)
- I've Been Thinking (Allen Lane 2023)
See also
- The Atheism Tapes
- Cartesian materialism
- Conscious Robots
- Evolutionary psychology of religion
- Greedy reductionism
- Geoffrey Miller (evolutionary psychologist)
- Heterophenomenology
- Intentional stance
- List of Jean Nicod Prize laureates
- Memetics
- Multiple drafts theory of consciousness
- Philosophy of Religion
- American philosophy
- List of American philosophers
