Daniel Clement Dennett III (March 28, 1942 – April 19, 2024) was an American philosopher and cognitive scientist. His research centered on philosophy of mind, philosophy of science, and philosophy of biology, particularly as those fields relate to evolutionary biology and cognitive science.
Dennett was the co-director of the Center for Cognitive Studies and the Austin B. Fletcher Professor of Philosophy at Tufts University in Massachusetts. Dennett was a member of the editorial board for The Rutherford Journal and a co-founder of The Clergy Project.
Dennett has been described as "one of the most widely read and debated American philosophers". A vocal atheist and secularist, he was referred to as one of the "Four Horsemen" of New Atheism, along with Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens.
Daniel Clement Dennett III was born on March 28, 1942, in Boston, Massachusetts, the son of Ruth Marjorie (née Leck; 1903–1971) and Daniel Clement Dennett Jr. (1910–1947).
Dennett spent part of his childhood in Lebanon, where, during World War II, his father, who had a PhD in Islamic studies from Harvard University, was a covert counter-intelligence agent with the Office of Strategic Services posing as a cultural attaché to the American Embassy in Beirut. His mother, an English major at Carleton College, went for a master's degree at the University of Minnesota before becoming an English teacher at the American Community School in Beirut. In 1947, his father was killed in a plane crash in Ethiopia. Shortly after, his mother took him back to Massachusetts. Dennett's sister is the investigative journalist Charlotte Dennett.
Dennett said that he was first introduced to the notion of philosophy while attending Camp Mowglis in Hebron, New Hampshire, at age 11, when a camp counselor said to him, "You know what you are, Daniel? You're a philosopher."
Dennett graduated from Phillips Exeter Academy in 1959, and spent one year at Wesleyan University before receiving his BA degree in philosophy at Harvard University in 1963. There, he was a student of Willard Van Orman Quine. He had decided to transfer to Harvard after reading Quine's From a Logical Point of View and, thinking that Quine was wrong about some things, decided, as he said "as only a freshman could, that I had to go to Harvard and confront this man with my corrections to his errors!"
In 1965, Dennett received his DPhil in philosophy at the University of Oxford, where he studied under Gilbert Ryle and was a member of Hertford College. His doctoral dissertation was entitled The Mind and the Brain: Introspective Description in the Light of Neurological Findings; Intentionality.
From 1965 to 1971, Dennett taught at the University of California, Irvine, before moving to Tufts University where he taught for five decades. He also spent periods visiting at Harvard University and several other universities. Dennett described himself as "an autodidact—or, more properly, the beneficiary of hundreds of hours of informal tutorials on all the fields that interest me, from some of the world's leading scientists".
Throughout his career, he was an interdisciplinarian who argued for "breaking the silos of knowledge", and he collaborated widely with computer scientists, cognitive scientists, and biologists.
Dennett co-edited and co-authored the 1981 collection The Mind's I with Douglas Hofstadter. He wrote an afterword for the 1999 reissue of The Extended Phenotype by Richard Dawkins. He wrote an introduction to a 2002 edition of Gilbert Ryle's The Concept of Mind. Dennett was the recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship and two Guggenheim Fellowships.
He retired emeritus from Tufts in 2022 in a shared celebration with his longtime friend and colleague in philosophy George E. Smith.
While he was a confirmed compatibilist on free will, in "On Giving Libertarians What They Say They Want"—chapter 15 of his 1978 book Brainstorms—Dennett articulated the case for a two-stage model of decision making in contrast to libertarian views.
The model of decision making I am proposing has the following feature: when we are faced with an important decision, a consideration-generator whose output is to some degree undetermined, produces a series of considerations, some of which may of course be immediately rejected as irrelevant by the agent (consciously or unconsciously). Those considerations that are selected by the agent as having a more than negligible bearing on the decision then figure in a reasoning process, and if the agent is in the main reasonable, those considerations ultimately serve as predictors and explicators of the agent's final decision.
While other philosophers have developed two-stage models, including William James, Henri Poincaré, Arthur Compton, and Henry Margenau, Dennett defended this model for the following reasons:
First ... The intelligent selection, rejection, and weighing of the considerations that do occur to the subject is a matter of intelligence making the difference.
Second, I think it installs indeterminism in the right place for the libertarian, if there is a right place at all.
Third ... from the point of view of biological engineering, it is just more efficient and in the end more rational that decision making should occur in this way.