Daniel C. Dennett (b.1942,) fully Daniel Clement Dennett III, is an American naturalist philosopher specializing in the philosophy of mind. He became a prominent figure in the atheist movement at the beginning of the 21st century.
Born in Boston, Dennett was educated at the universities of Harvard and Oxford. At Oxford, he studied the nature of consciousness under the philosopher Gilbert Ryle and published his doctoral thesis as his first book, Content and Consciousness (1969.) He taught at the University of California, Irvine 1965–71, and has since worked mostly as a professor of philosophy and director of the Center for Cognitive Studies at Tufts University.
Dennett’s influential writings on the mind have included the books Brainstorms (1978,) Consciousness Explained (1991,) Darwin’s Dangerous Idea (1995,) and Kinds of Minds (1996.) Other philosophical works include Brainchildren: Essays on Designing Minds (1998) and Neuroscience and Philosophy: Brain, Mind, and Language (2007.)
Dennett is a prominent advocate of an atheist worldview. His Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon (2006) proposed evolutionary explanations for the development of religious thought. He is one of the four “Four Horsemen of Atheism”—the other New Atheism activists being biologist Richard Dawkins, polemicist Christopher Hitchens, and neuroscientist Sam Harris.
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Problems in science are sometimes made easier by adding complications.
—Daniel C. Dennett
If I know better than you know what I am up to, it is only because I spend more time with myself than you do.
—Daniel C. Dennett
The methods of science aren’t foolproof, but they are indefinitely perfectible. Just as important: there is a tradition of criticism that enforces improvement whenever and wherever flaws are discovered.
—Daniel C. Dennett
There’s nothing I like less than bad arguments for a view I hold dear.
—Daniel C. Dennett
Topics: Argument
Good intentions and inspiration are simply not enough.
—Daniel C. Dennett
I am inclined to think that nothing could matter more than what people love. At any rate, I can think of no value that I would place higher. I would not want to live in a world without love. Would a world with peace, but without love, be a better world? Not if the peace was achieved by drugging the love (and hate) out of us, or by suppression.
—Daniel C. Dennett
We need to let our children grow up to face the world armed with knowledge, with much more knowledge than we ourselves had at their age. It is scary, but the alternative is worse.
—Daniel C. Dennett
We have learned in recent years that the techniques of misinformation and misdirection have become so refined that, even in an open society, a cleverly directed flood of misinformation can overwhelm the truth, even though the truth is out there, uncensored, quietly available to anyone who can find it.
—Daniel C. Dennett
What you can imagine depends on what you know.
—Daniel C. Dennett
Let your self go. If you can approach the world’s complexities, both its glories and its horrors, with an attitude of humble curiosity, acknowledging that however deeply you have seen, you have only scratched the surface, you will find worlds within worlds, beauties you could not heretofore imagine, and your own mundane preoccupations will shrink to proper size, not all that important in the greater scheme of things.
—Daniel C. Dennett
The secret of happiness: Find something more important than you are and dedicate your life to it.
—Daniel C. Dennett
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