Daniel Dennett, the American philosopher, who has died aged 82, was, along with Richard Dawkins, a leading proponent of Darwinism and one of the most virulent controversialists in the academic circuit.
Dennett argued that everything must be understood in terms of natural processes, and that terms such as 'intelligence', 'free will', 'consciousness', 'justice', the 'soul' or the 'self' describe phenomena that can be explained in terms of natural processes. terms of physical processes and not the exercise of some immaterial or metaphysical power. He regarded how such processes work as an empirical question, to be answered by looking at neuroanatomy - the technology involved in the brain.
For Dennett, Darwinism was the great unifying principle that explains how the simplest organisms evolved into humans who can theorize about the kinds of creatures we are. In Consciousness Explored (1991), he argued that the term 'consciousness' merely describes 'the tendencies to behave' and that the idea of the 'self' was nothing more than a 'narrative center of gravity'.
In Darwin's Dangerous Idea (1995), he went further than any other philosopher or biologist in arguing that all of nature, including all individual human and social behavior, is underpinned by a Darwinian 'algorithm' - a single arithmetic, computational procedure .
Dennett borrowed Richard Dawkins' notion of 'memes' ('bytes' of transferable cultural ideas encompassing everything from belief in God to an individual's fashion taste) and argued that the Darwinian algorithm also explained, for example, the musical genius of JS Bach, whose brain "is exquisitely designed as a program for composing music."
Dennett's philosophy undermined any idea of teleology or "purposive" creation. Our existence makes no sense whatsoever, he claimed, and those who believe otherwise rely on 'skyhooks' ('hooks' that can be attached to the sky to make building skyscrapers easier). Skyhooks don't exist, of course, but, Dennett argued, men reach for a piece of magic, a designer behind the design, to avoid the idea that life has no intrinsic meaning.
In contrast, he called the Darwinists the 'brights', a group he tended (perhaps understandably in the American context) to regard as an oppressed minority.
Dennett was not a man who shrank from conflict. On the door of his office at Tufts University, Boston, Massachusetts, he posted Gore Vidal's comment: "It is not enough to succeed; others must fail." His targets included most of the big names in the recent history of ideas - John Searle, Noam Chomsky, George Steiner, Stephen Jay Gould, Roger Penrose, Jerry Fodor, Richard Lewontin - all, according to Dennett, "skyhook" traders.
Gould, a staunch opponent of the kind of evolutionary psychology Dennett advocated, was a particular target. In Darwin's Dangerous Idea, Dennett devoted four chapters to Gould's demolition.
But Dennett's harshest judgment was reserved for the peddlers of religion, whom he, like Dawkins, regarded as a "meme" as dangerous as the AIDS virus. In Breaking the Spell (2006), he attempted to demonstrate that religion itself is a biologically evolved concept, and one that has outlived its usefulness.
Dennett's opponents pointed out that in adhering to his views on the evolutionary basis of faith, Dennett was as closed to opposing views as any religious fundamentalist. With his flowing white beard and mustache, he did indeed resemble a 17th-century Ranter. There were also those who wondered exactly what scientific evidence he had to support his arguments.
After all, Dennett argued that religion is subject to the 'laws' of evolution - such as natural selection. By embracing the idea of religion as a self-propagating "meme" that mutates as it is passed down through generations of human "hosts," he tied his reputation to an idea for which there is no supporting data at all.
When asked how he could be so confident, Dennett replied: "It helps to be right, I guess."
Daniel Dennett was born in Beirut on March 28, 1942, into an established New England family. His father, Daniel Dennett senior, was a leading historian who specialized in the social and political history of Islam. At the time of his son's birth, he had transferred from Harvard to the University of Beirut to complete his doctorate. When America entered World War II, he was recruited into the CIA's predecessor in the Middle East. He died in a plane crash during a mission to Ethiopia in 1948, when his son was five.
The family - his mother, Daniel, and two sisters - returned to New England. "I grew up in the shadow of everyone's memories of a pretty legendary father," Dennett recalls. "Everyone assumed I would eventually go to Harvard and become a professor."
After attending Phillips Exeter Academy, he attended Wesleyan University, where he took a paper in mathematical logic in his first year and chanced upon WVO Quine's From a Logical Point of View (1953). He disagreed with Quine, but became so fascinated that he immediately wrote to Harvard, where Quine was teaching, requesting a transfer. "I thought I was going to be a philosopher and... tell this man Quine why he was wrong," Dennett recalled.
After receiving his degree from Harvard, Dennett entered Oxford as a graduate student, where Gilbert Ryle, warned by Quine, had found a place for him at Hertford College. Strangely enough, the strongest impression Dennett made at Oxford had little to do with his academic talents. As well as being a talented sculptor, he supplemented his pocket money by playing jazz piano in bars and also claimed to have introduced the first Frisbee to Britain and watched the meme-like colonization of the country.
While at Harvard he was seen as a critic of Quine, at Oxford he was seen as "the village Quinean". It was also in Oxford that he first became interested in the functioning of the brain.
The Oxford philosopher John Lucas had published a paper arguing that Gödel's incompleteness theorem refuted the thesis that human brains work like machines or that human thinking can be fully simulated on a computer. Dennett effectively devoted the rest of his life to challenging this view.
When Dennett returned to America at age 23 and got his first job-at the University of California, Irvine-his ideas were almost fully formed. A version of his thesis was published in 1969 as Content and Consciousness; his next book, Brainstorms (1978), contained the first full statement of his distinctive approach to brain behavior and its relationship to philosophical concepts.
By 1971, Dennett had moved to Tufts University, where he became professor and chairman of the philosophy department and, from the age of 85, director of the Center for Cognitive Studies. In the 1970s and 1980s he formed two friendships that would have a major influence on his work: with Richard Dawkins, whose Selfish Gene was published in 1976, and with Douglas Hofstadter, the computer scientist who wrote Godel, Escher, Bach (1979), a classic work on artificial intelligence.
Towards the end of the 1970s, Dennett spent a year at Stanford with Hofstadter and they collaborated on an anthology, The Mind's I (1981), which, along with his collection of essays, Brainchildren (1998), remains the clearest representation of Dennett's thinking .
Dennett's books, although compact, sold astonishingly well. In Freedom Evolves (2003) he argued that people with genes that predispose them to alcoholism or crime, for example, are not destined to become alcoholics or criminals, because they also have an evolutionarily determined free will. "Free will is like the air we breathe, and is present almost everywhere we want to go," he argued, "but not only is it not eternal, it has evolved and is still evolving."
Daniel Dennett married Susan Bell in 1963, with whom he had a son and a daughter.
Daniel Dennett, born March 28, 1942, died April 19, 2024
