Daniel C. Dennett's Home Page

Daniel C. Dennett, Co-Director
Center for Cognitive Studies
University Professor
Austin B. Fletcher Professor of Philosophy
Tufts University
Medford, MA 02155-7059
(617) 627-3297/fax: (617) 627-3952

ddennett@tufts.edu
curriculum vitae
bibliography

Recent and forthcoming papers

Read a tribute read by Richard Dawkins while giving Dan Dennett an award

“Is religion a threat to rationality and science?” in eG Weekly, The London Guardian, April 22nd, 2008.

Listen to a podcast of Dan Dennett at Agora's Science, Religion and Reason Debate in London, April 22nd, 2008

He also can be heard here, on the BBC - Radio 4 - Start the Week program, recorded April 21, 2008

 

VIDEOS:

Debating Dinesh D'Souza at Tufts University, November 30th, 2007

Lecturing at Beyond Belief: Enlightenment 2.0, October 31, 2007

Being interviewed on CCTV International, January 2nd, 2008

Check out this video version of the dramatization of "Where am I?" made in Holland

 

Daniel C. Dennett, the author of Breaking the Spell (Viking, 2006), Freedom Evolves (Viking Penguin, 2003) and Darwin's Dangerous Idea (Simon &Schuster, 1995), is University Professor and Austin B. Fletcher Professor of Philosophy, and Co-Director of the Center for Cognitive Studies at Tufts University. He lives with his wife in North Andover, Massachusetts, and has a daughter, a son, and a grandson. He was born in Boston in 1942, the son of a historian by the same name, and received his B.A. in philosophy from Harvard in 1963. He then went to Oxford to work with Gilbert Ryle, under whose supervision he completed the D.Phil. in philosophy in 1965. He taught at U.C. Irvine from 1965 to 1971, when he moved to Tufts, where he has taught ever since, aside from periods visiting at Harvard, Pittsburgh, Oxford, and the École Normale Supérieure in Paris.

His first book, Content and Consciousness, appeared in 1969, followed by Brainstorms (1978), Elbow Room (1984), The Intentional Stance (1987), Consciousness Explained (1991), Darwin's Dangerous Idea (1995), Kinds of Minds (1996), and Brainchildren: A Collection of Essays 1984-1996 (MIT Press and Penguin, 1998). Sweet Dreams: Philosophical Obstacles to a Science of Consciousness, was published in 2005 by MIT Press. He co-edited The Mind's I with Douglas Hofstadter in 1981. He is the author of over three hundred scholarly articles on various aspects on the mind, published in journals ranging from Artificial Intelligence and Behavioral and Brain Sciences to Poetics Today and the Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism.

He gave the John Locke Lectures at Oxford in 1983, the Gavin David Young Lectures at Adelaide, Australia, in 1985, and the Tanner Lecture at Michigan in 1986, among many others. He has received two Guggenheim Fellowships, a Fulbright Fellowship, and a Fellowship at the Center for Advanced Studies in Behavioral Science. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1987.

He was the Co-founder (in 1985) and Co-director of the Curricular Software Studio at Tufts, and has helped to design museum exhibits on computers for the Smithsonian Institution, the Museum of Science in Boston, and the Computer Museum in Boston.

He spends most of his summers on his farm in Maine, where he harvests blueberries, hay and timber, and makes Normandy cider wine, when he is not sailing. He is also a sculptor.

DO YOU RECOGNIZE THIS ROBOTIC DOG?

REWARD for information! I found it in an antique shop in Paris. It was made in France in the 1950s, so I have named it Tati, in honor of Jacques Tati (whose classic film Mon Oncle captures the same era with the same ingenious and humorous use of technology). I do not know who made Tati, or why, and would be pleased to receive any substantiated information about its provenance.

 

 

Highly recommended links:

Edge.org

The Brights

Butterflies and Wheels

Richard Dawkins

Life 32

Conway's Game of Life

The Mac version of Life

 

Center for Cognitive Studies Homepage