47 Facts About Daniel Dennett

Daniel Clement Dennett III was an American philosopher and cognitive scientist.

Daniel Dennett's research centered on the philosophy of mind, the philosophy of science, and the philosophy of biology, particularly as those fields relate to evolutionary biology and cognitive science.

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

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 BA degree in philosophy at Harvard University in 1963.

In 1965, Daniel Dennett received his DPhil in philosophy at the University of Oxford, where he studied under Gilbert Ryle and was a member of Hertford College.

From 1965 to 1971, Daniel Dennett taught at the University of California, Irvine, before moving to Tufts University where he taught for many decades.

Daniel Dennett spent periods visiting at Harvard University and several other universities.

Daniel Dennett was the recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship and two Guggenheim Fellowships.

Daniel Dennett is a proponent of materialism in the philosophy of mind.

Daniel Dennett argues that mental states, including consciousness, are entirely the result of physical processes in the brain.

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

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

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

Daniel Dennett stated his view is materialist and scientific, and he presents an argument against qualia; he argued that the concept of qualia 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.

Daniel Dennett's strategy mirrored his teacher Ryle's approach of redefining first-person phenomena in third-person terms, and denying the coherence of the concepts which this approach struggles with.

Daniel Dennett was credited with inspiring false belief tasks used in developmental psychology.

Daniel Dennett noted that when four-year-olds watch the Punch and Judy puppet show, they laugh because they know that they know more about what's going on than one of the characters does:.

Daniel Dennett saw 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 was 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 was 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 wrote that evolution can account for the origin of morality.

Daniel Dennett rejected 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 did 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, his last work on this topic being 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 believed 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.

The project did not produce a conscious robot, but Daniel Dennett argued that in principle it could have.

Daniel Dennett believed, as of the book's publication in 2017, that the prospect of superintelligence was at least 50 years away, and of far less pressing significance than other problems the world faces.

Daniel Dennett posited that our discourse about reality is mediated by our cognitive and linguistic capacities, marking a departure from Naive realism.

Daniel Dennett drew a distinction between illata, which are genuine theoretical entities like electrons, and abstracta, which are "calculation bound entities or logical constructs" such as centers of gravity and the equator, placing beliefs and the like among the latter.

One of Daniel Dennett's principal arguments was an instrumentalistic construal of intentional attributions, asserting that such attributions are environment-relative.

In discussing intentional states, Daniel Dennett posited that they should not be thought of as resembling theoretical entities, but rather as logical constructs, avoiding the pitfalls of intentional realism without lapsing into pure instrumentalism or even eliminativism.

Daniel Dennett was the recipient of a Fellowship at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences.

Daniel Dennett was 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 became a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2009.

Daniel Dennett was an avid sailor who loved sailing Xanthippe, his 13-meter sailboat.

Daniel Dennett played many musical instruments and sang at glee clubs.

Daniel Dennett died of interstitial lung disease at Maine Medical Center on April 19,2024, at the age of 82.