Daniel Dennett
Last update: 21 Apr 2025 21:17
First version:
There's a party in my mind
And the party never stops
Party up there all the time
Gonna party till they drop
One of my favorite writers, whose books have
changed my mind about
things like what a self really is and whether or not there's free will. He was
Quine's student, and I rather expect he'll one day
hold a similar position to his teacher's. He now has a
homepage of his own.
See also:
Adaptation;
Artificial Intelligence;
Artificial Life;
William Calvin;
Cognitive Science;
Richard Dawkins (they're thick as
thieves);
Darwin Machines;
Ethics, Game Theory and Biology;
Evolution;
Evolutionary Epistemology;
Evolutionary Psychology;
William James (Dennett in a previous incarnation);
Julian Jaynes;
Memes, and Related Ideas about the Evolution of
Culture;
Narratives;
Nietzsche (whom Dennett calls the "second sociobiologist," the first being Hobbes);
Neuroscience;
Philosophy of Mind;
Possession and Multiple Personality
Disorder;
Universal Images and Cultural
Universals
Recommended:
- Brainchildren: Essays on Designing Minds [Essay
collection, including many of his best pieces, some formerly available at his
web-site, like "Real Patterns" (on reductionism
and emergent properties, and complexity and cellular automata), "Speaking for Our Selves"
(on multiple personality), "The Practical
Requirements for Making a Conscious Robot," "Artificial
Life as Philosophy," "Information, Technology and the Virtues of Ignorance"
(one of the most disturbing things I've ever read about the consequences of
computerization), etc. Review: An Attempt
to Introduce the Experimental Method of Reasoning into Moral Subjects by
your humble narrator]
- Consciousness Explained [Review by Danny Yee]
- Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of
Life [Possibly his best-written book. When it showed up at the local
yuppie bookstore, costing what was then a significant fraction of my disposable
income, I told myself "I can't afford this" all the way to the cash-register.
Reviews by John Maynard
Smith and by Danny Yee.]
- Elbow Room: The Varieties of Free Will Worth Wanting
[Review by Danny Yee]
- Kinds of Minds [a.k.a. "Dennett for Beginners"]
- A whole bunch of papers from the publications list of the Tufts Center for Cognitive Studies,
which is, in essence, Dennett.
- (ed.) Philosophical
Lexicon [Collection of puns on philosophers' names. Samples:
"arthurdantist, n. One who straightens the teeth of exotic dogmas. `Little Friedrich used to say the most wonderful things
before we took him to the arthurdantist!' --- Frau Nietzsche"; "croce, n. A
method of knitting spaghetti; thus, an intricate tangle."; "foucault, n. A
howler, an insane mistake. `I'm afraid I've committed an egregious foucault.'
"; "marcuse, v. To criticize vehemently from a Marxist perspective. `Je
marcuse!' - J. P. Sartre."]
To read:
- Jeremy C. Ahouse, "The Tragedy of a priori Selectionism:
Dennett and Gould on Adaptationism", Biology and
Philosophy 13 (1998): 359--391 [Critical piece
recommended to me by Milan Cirkovic.]
- Andrew Brook and Don Ross (eds.), Daniel Dennett
- DCD
- Breaking the Spell
- Freedom Evolves
- The Intentional Stance
- "Notes on Prosthetic Imagination," Boston
Review 7(3), pp. 3-7 (= June '82)
- Sweet Dreams: Philosophical Obstacles to a Science of
Consciousness
[Blurb]
- Matthew Elton, Daniel Dennett: Reconciling Science and Our
Self-Conception
Last major revision, 2004年08月22日 12:30