Daniel Dennett (1942-2024) - Daily Nous
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Daniel Dennett, professor emeritus of philosophy at Tufts University, well-known for his work in philosophy of mind and a wide range of other philosophical areas, has died. Professor Dennett wrote extensively about issues related to philosophy of mind and cognitive science, especially consciousness. He is also recognized as having made significant contributions to the concept of intentionality and debates on free will. Some of Professor Dennett’s books include Content and Consciousness (1969), Brainstorms: Philosophical Essays on Mind and Psychology (1981), The Intentional Stance (1987), Consciousness Explained (1992), Darwin’s Dangerous Idea (1995), Breaking the Spell (2006), and From Bacteria to Bach and Back: The Evolution of Minds (2017). He published a memoir last year entitled I’ve Been Thinking. There are also several books about him and his ideas. You can learn more about his work here. Professor Dennett held a position at Tufts University for nearly all his career. Prior to this, he held a position at the University of California, Irvine from 1965 to 1971. He also held visiting positions at Oxford, Harvard, Pittsburgh, and other institutions during his time at Tufts University. Professor Dennett was awarded his PhD from the University of Oxford in 1965 and his undergraduate degree in philosophy from Harvard University in 1963. Professor Dennett is the recipient of several awards and prizes including the Jean Nicod Prize, the Mind and Brain Prize, and the Erasmus Prize. He also held a Fulbright Fellowship, two Guggenheim Fellowships, and a Fellowship at the Center for Advanced Study in Behavioral Sciences. An outspoken atheist, Professor Dennett was dubbed one of the “Four Horsemen of New Atheism”. He was also a Fellow of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry, an honored Humanist Laureate of the International Academy of Humanism, and was named Humanist of the Year by the American Humanist Organization. The following interview with Professor Dennett was recorded last year: (via Eric Schliesser) Related: “Philosophers: Stop Being Self-Indulgent and Start Being Like Daniel Dennett, says Daniel Dennett” (Other DN posts on Dennett can be found here.)

He was controversial, but he was in my opinion one of the best all-around living philosophers. He was enormously influential on my own thinking, as well as kind and patient every time I met him. Enormously influential, and a big loss to the discipline.

There is no philosophy-free science; there is only science whose philosophical baggage was taken on board without examination.

    • Philosoraptor [he/him, comrade/them]
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      7 months ago

      Dennett was much less of a dipshit about that stuff than the others were/are, and did come to somewhat regret his involvement with that movement after it fed into the alt-right. Breaking the Spell is a significantly more thoughtful and nuanced work than The God Delusion or whatever dumbfuck title Harris and Hitchens came up with, as you would expect from an actual philosopher. It's worth a read, and (to my knowledge) he never went down the idiotic "anti-feminist" and "western chauvinist" pipeline that the others did. It's an unfortunate association for sure and a black mark on his record, but it's definitely not fair to put him in the same bucket as the other three in general.

      • Tabitha ☢️[she/her]
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        7 months ago

        That's good to know. I remember when the Four Horsemen came out, it's wild how different the political rhetoric around these individuals is a little bit flipped, comparing back then (the right hated them) and now (some of them got a little too cozy with Christian fundies).

      • ReadFanon [any, any]
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        7 months ago

        Yeah, of the four he was definitely the least insufferable by far.

        Hitchens was a typical Br*t and spent the latter part of his career larping as Winston Churchill, both in his politics and in his eagerness to advocate for the murdering of the brown people (not to mention constantly chasing the opportunity to drop some witty quip about how women are terrible or some shit). He's the perfect example of the Trot-neocon pipeline and Normal Finkelstein's Hitchens as Model Apostate is a really good article on the "why I left the left" aura that Hitchens commanded in the media, and this applies to every other ex-left grifter as well (it written two decades ago! Although the model apostate had been a phenomenon for at least half a century by this point - figures like Orlov and Bezmenov come to mind as prominent examples.)

        The other two don't even deserve my time aside from mentioning the fact that Dawkins, in The Selfish Gene, goes entirely off the rails in how he conceives of "memes" (in the original sense) and it illustrates why experts need to stay in their fucking lane because his argument takes everything that is evolution and transposes it onto a realm where none of the conditions for evolution exist.

        It's an interesting idea, I guess, but meme theory was an absurd overreach imo.

        • Philosoraptor [he/him, comrade/them]
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          7 months ago

          The other two don't even deserve my time aside from mentioning the fact that Dawkins, in The Selfish Gene, goes entirely off the rails in how he conceives of "memes" (in the original sense) and it illustrates why experts need to stay in their fucking lane

          Just to add on to this, Sam Harris isn't even good in his own (ostensible) lane. His neuroscience PhD dissertation is almost shockingly bad. I have no idea how they awarded him the degree, except maybe just to get rid of him because he was so insufferable. Dawkins at least has some real and respectable scientific scholarship in his past; Sam Harris has never been anything but a grifter.