Daniel Dennett

Key ideas

In Consciousness Explained, Dennett rejected the idea of a 'Cartesian theatre', a place in the brain where everything comes together to be watched by an inner self. Instead, many parallel processes produce 'multiple drafts' of experience, none of them final. He argued that qualia, understood as ineffable private qualities, do not exist, and that philosophical zombies are not really conceivable.

On free will he was a leading compatibilist. In Elbow Room and Freedom Evolves he argued that the kinds of freedom worth wanting, the capacity to deliberate, foresee and avoid, evolved naturally and are fully compatible with determinism.

He was a master of what he called intuition pumps, thought experiments designed to provoke an intuition, and spent much of his career arguing that many famous ones, including Mary's room and the Chinese room, pump the wrong intuitions.

Life, briefly

Dennett studied at Harvard and Oxford and taught at Tufts University for most of his career. He was also a sailor, a farmer and a sculptor, and became one of the best-known public philosophers of his time.

Major works

• Elbow Room (1984)
• The Intentional Stance (1987)
• Consciousness Explained (1991)
• Darwin's Dangerous Idea (1995)
• Freedom Evolves (2003)
• Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking (2013)

Further reading

• WikipediaDaniel Dennett