- Lived:
- 1942–2024 · Boston, Beirut, Oxford, and fifty years at Tufts University, with a farm in Maine
- Tradition:
- American analytic philosophy of mind, fused with evolutionary biology and cognitive science
- The Big Idea:
- There is no inner theater and no magic ingredient of consciousness — the mind is a bag of tricks built by evolution, and it can be explained the way everything else in nature is explained.
- In their words:
- On Darwin's theory of natural selection: "the single best idea anyone has ever had."
- If you remember one thing:
- Dennett spent sixty years arguing that you don't need a ghost, a soul, or a spark of mind-stuff to explain the mind — and then spent his last year warning us about the artificial minds we were about to counterfeit.