27 Facts About Daniel Dennett

Daniel Clement Dennett III was born on March 28,1942 and is an American philosopher, writer, and cognitive scientist whose research centers on the philosophy of mind, philosophy of science, and philosophy of biology, particularly as those fields relate to evolutionary biology and cognitive science.

Daniel Dennett spent part of his childhood in Lebanon, where, during World War II, his father, who had a PhD in Islamic Studies from Harvard University, was a covert counter-intelligence agent with the Office of Strategic Services posing as a cultural attache to the American Embassy in Beirut.

Daniel Dennett graduated from Phillips Exeter Academy in 1959, and spent one year at Wesleyan University before receiving his Bachelor of Arts in philosophy at Harvard University in 1963.

Daniel Dennett's dissertation was entitled The Mind and the Brain: Introspective Description in the Light of Neurological Findings; Intentionality.

Daniel Dennett taught at the University of California, Irvine, from 1965 to 1971, before moving to Tufts University, where he settled in for many decades, aside from periods visiting at Harvard University and several other schools.

Daniel Dennett is the recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship, two Guggenheim Fellowships, and a Fellowship at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences.

Daniel Dennett is a Fellow of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry and a Humanist Laureate of the International Academy of Humanism.

Daniel Dennett was named 2004 Humanist of the Year by the American Humanist Association.

In 2006, Daniel Dennett received the Golden Plate Award of the American Academy of Achievement.

Daniel Dennett has remarked in several places that his overall philosophical project has remained largely the same since his time at Oxford.

Daniel Dennett is primarily concerned with providing a philosophy of mind that is grounded in empirical research.

In chapter 5 of Consciousness Explained Daniel Dennett describes his multiple drafts model of consciousness.

Daniel Dennett sees evolution by natural selection as an algorithmic process.

In Darwin's Dangerous Idea, Daniel Dennett showed himself even more willing than Dawkins to defend adaptationism in print, devoting an entire chapter to a criticism of the ideas of Gould.

Wilson and other evolutionary biologists over human sociobiology and its descendant evolutionary psychology, which Gould and Richard Lewontin opposed, but which Daniel Dennett advocated, together with Dawkins and Steven Pinker.

Gould argued that Daniel Dennett overstated his claims and misrepresented Gould's, to reinforce what Gould describes as Daniel Dennett's "Darwinian fundamentalism".

Daniel Dennett's theories have had a significant influence on the work of evolutionary psychologist Geoffrey Miller.

Daniel Dennett is a vocal atheist and secularist, a member of the Secular Coalition for America advisory board, and a member of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry, as well as an outspoken supporter of the Brights movement.

Daniel Dennett is referred to as one of the "Four Horsemen of New Atheism", along with Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and the late Christopher Hitchens.

In Darwin's Dangerous Idea, Daniel Dennett writes that evolution can account for the origin of morality.

Daniel Dennett rejects the idea that morality being natural to us implies that we should take a skeptical position regarding ethics, noting that what is fallacious in the naturalistic fallacy is not to support values per se, but rather to rush from facts to values.

Daniel Dennett has been doing research into clerics who are secretly atheists and how they rationalize their works.

Daniel Dennett found what he called a "don't ask, don't tell" conspiracy because believers did not want to hear of loss of faith.

Daniel Dennett wrote about and advocated the notion of memetics as a philosophically useful tool, most recently in his "Brains, Computers, and Minds", a three-part presentation through Harvard's MBB 2009 Distinguished Lecture Series.

Daniel Dennett adopted and somewhat redefined the term "deepity", originally coined by Miriam Weizenbaum.

Daniel Dennett used "deepity" for a statement that is apparently profound, but is actually trivial on one level and meaningless on another.

Daniel Dennett believes the relevant danger from artificial intelligence is that people will misunderstand the nature of basically "parasitic" AI systems, rather than employing them constructively to challenge and develop the human user's powers of comprehension.