Daniel Dennett

Daniel Dennett teaches at the Centre for Cognitive Studies at Tufts University in Massachusetts. His books include Consciousness Explained.

Wired for Sound

Daniel Dennett, 23 June 1994

There was language long before there was writing, a fact that we literate investigators tend to underestimate. Today we are building the information superhighway, and for several millennia the written word has been a primary medium of cultural transmission, but for at least a thousand millennia before that, the main medium of information transfer from generation to generation was the well-beaten path of word of mouth. Language was already a highly refined biological product, complete with all its modern appurtenances, long before writing was invented.

Why would Mother Nature bother?

Jerry Fodor, 6 March 2003

Been feeling bad about being a thing? Been feeling that the laws of nature are pushing you around? Here’s a book-length dose of Daniel Dennett’s Cold Comfort Cure. According to...

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Blunder around for a while

Richard Rorty, 21 November 1991

For more than forty years, starting with the publication of Ryle’s very influential The Concept of Mind in 1949, some of the best of the analytic philosophers have devoted themselves to the...

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Dennett’s Ark

P.N. Johnson-Laird, 1 September 1988

When the single-celled organism paramecium bumps into an obstacle, it reverses the power beat of its cilia, backs away, and swims off in a different direction. How natural to suppose that this...

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Both this and the following statement are false. Douglas Hofstadter and Daniel Dennett’s book is well worth £9.95. One does not have to be a philosopher to realise that I have already...

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