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Daniel Clement Dennett III (March 28, 1942 - Present)
Daniel Clement Dennett III was born on March 28, 1942 in Boston, Massachusetts to Ruth Marjorie and Daniel Clement Jr. His mother was an editor and a teacher and his father was a scholar of Islamic history and also a secret counter intelligence agent for the Office of Strategic Services in Lebanon, which is where the family lived up until his father died in a mysterious plane crash. At five years old, Daniel and his mother moved back to Boston, Massachusetts. -
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Daniel Clement Dennett III (March 28, 1942 - Present)
When he was eleven years old, Daniel was first introduced to Philosophy during a summer camp. He attended Philips Exeter Academy after which he enrolled for a year at the Wesleyan University. He married his wife, Susan Bell, in 1962. (The couple has a son and a daughter. They reside in North Andover, Massachusetts). In 1963, he received his Bachelor of Arts degree in philosophy from Harvard University. -
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Daniel Clement Dennett III (March 28, 1942 - Present)
Completing his graduate studies, he enrolled at the University of Oxford for further studies under Gilbert Ryle. In 1965, he passed with a Doctorate of Philosophy. While at the university, he was a member of Hertford College. Following his doctorate degree, he took up a teaching position at UC Irvine for six years, from 1965 to 1971. Thereafter, he moved to the University of Tufts where he has been serving as a Professor till date. -
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Daniel Clement Dennett III (March 28, 1942 - Present)
While continuing his teaching position, he came up with a number of publications, the first being “Brainstorms: Philosophical Essays on Mind and Psychology”, which was published in 1978. The book deals with artificial intelligence and uses it to develop his ideas on consciousness. In 1981, he wrote ‘The Mind’s I: Fantasies and Reflection on Self and Soul’ and ‘Elbow Room: The Varieties of Free Will Worth Wanting’ in 1984, which addressed philosophical issues related to free will and determinism. -
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Daniel Clement Dennett III (March 28, 1942 - Present)
In 1993, Dennett was involved with a team at the MIT that attempted to construct an intelligent, and perhaps even conscious, robot called Cog. He also continued to write on his theories of consciousness. Two of them, Consciousness Explained (1991) and Darwin’s Dangerous Idea (1995), examined how the mindless process of natural selection accounts for the evolution of the brain and human consciousness. Dennett continued to explore and to demystify those phenomena in Kinds of Minds (1996). -
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Daniel Clement Dennett III (March 28, 1942 - Present)
He coined a term ‘intentional stance' while working on the theories of the mind, biology and science, that described the level of abstraction and mental properties that we view regarding the behavior of things. He came up with three levels of abstraction, the physical stance, the design stance and intentional stance. In 1991, he came up with the work ‘Consciousness Explained’ where he addressed how physical and cognitive processes in the brain lead to an awakening of the consciousness. -
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Daniel Clement Dennett III (March 28, 1942 - Present)
Dennett’s beliefs worked with a movement that held all forms of religion to be false and that advocated an atheist worldview. His 2006 work Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon showed how evolution developed religious thought. He considered religious inclinations to be caused by instinct-driven social phenomena. Dennett debated widely on the subject; a 2009 discussion with Christian philosopher Alvin Plantinga was published as Science and Religion: Are They Compatible? (2011). -
Daniel Clement Dennett III (March 28, 1942 - Present)
Daniel Dennett's alignment with the views of atheist activists such as Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and Sam Harris led Hitchens to identify the group as “the Four Horsemen of the Counter-Apocalypse.” In 2011, shortly before Hitchens' death, the four banded together for a deeply enriching conversation on the subject, which can be seen on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n7IHU28aR2E