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Daniel Dennett
University Professor, Director of the Center for Cognitive Studies, Tufts University
Daniel C. Dennett is the Austin B. Fletcher Professor of Philosophy and director of the Center for Cognitive Studies at Tufts University.
Dennett believes it's time to unmask the philosopher's art and make thought experimentation accessible to a wider audience.
"How to Think Like a Philosopher," Dennett's five-part workshop, is a journey into the labyrinthine mind games played by Dennett and his colleagues. For the more utilitarian-minded, these are mental practices that will improve your ability to focus and think both rationally and creatively.
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Language is a huge part of human development, even the language we keep to ourselves. Three experts explain how words and beliefs can change our brains and our lives:
Unlikely Collaborators
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How can the brain — a piece of matter — love? Physics and chemistry explain the material world, but they can’t explain why it feels like something to be alive. This is the mystery of consciousness, according to these experts.
Unlikely Collaborators
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“Forget about essences.” Philosopher Daniel Dennett on how modern-day philosophers should be more collaborative with scientists if they want to make revolutionary developments in their fields.
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Philosopher Daniel Dennett believes AI should never become conscious — and no, it's not because of the robopocalypse.
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We are what we are because of genes; we are who we are because of memes. Philosopher Daniel Dennett muses on an idea put forward by Richard Dawkins in 1976.
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The human mind is like a Turing machine, says Daniel Dennett. It's made up of unthinking cogs – but when combined in the right order, their motion gives rise to consciousness.
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Philosopher Daniel Dennett explains how the optimal strategy for winning a game of rock-paper-scissors isn't necessarily the optimal strategy for leading one's life.
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Philosopher Daniel Dennett take us through one of his "favorite bad thought experiments," an investigation of free will based on the sci-fi film "The Boys From Brazil."
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Dennett rebuts the argument that neuroscience implies we don't have free will.
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Philosopher Daniel Dennett investigates the theories related to how the brain represents ideas and beliefs while pondering an Inception-like situation in which beliefs are surgically inserted into a patient's brain.
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Daniel Dennett explains how intuition pumps (often referred to as "thought experiments") help guide philosophers' curiosity and thinking.
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Philosopher Daniel Dennett discusses reductio ad absurdum, "the workhorse of philosophical argumentation," wherewith thinkers test the validity of an opponent's argument by taking it to its most illogical extreme.
I think that philosophers are deeply resistant to acknowledging that most of the interesting categories they deal with have fuzzy boundaries.
The video is part of our series of the most popular videos of Summer 2013.
I wanted to draw attention to how philosophers actually go about their business and get them thinking more self-consciously about the tools they use and how they use them.
Here is a thought experiment that shows beliefs don’t parcel themselves out the way sentences do.
People have hang-ups and blind spots and phobias and just sometimes they have a principled refusal to take something seriously.
It’s the sort of general purpose crowbar of rational argument where you take your opponent's premises and deduce something absurd from them.
If you’re playing Rock-Paper-Scissors with God, then you should want quantum indeterminacy.