Philosopher Daniel Dennett died a few days ago, on April 19. When he argued that we overrate consciousness, he demonstrated, paradoxically, how conscious he was, and he made his audience more ...

Daniel C. Dennett, University Professor and Austin B. Fletcher Professor of Philosophy, and Director of the Center for Cognitive Studies at Tufts University, photographed in his office at Tufts.

"Trading in a supernatural soul for a natural soul—is this a fair bargain?" Dennett, seeking to fend off "caricatures of Darwinian thinking" that plague his philosophical camp, argues in this ...

From Bacteria to Bach and Back: The Evolution of Minds, by Daniel C. Dennett. W. W. Norton. 496 pages. $28.95. Consciousness Explained, by Daniel C. Dennett. Back Bay Books. 528 pages. $18. The great ...

This article was published in Scientific American’s former blog network and reflects the views of the author, not necessarily those of Scientific American Of all the odd notions to emerge from debates ...

Of all the odd notions to emerge from debates over consciousness, the oddest is that it doesn’t exist, at least not in the way we think it does. It is an illusion, like “Santa Claus” or “American ...

A grab-bag of metaphors and thought experiments, some more enlightening than others, structure this scattershot treatise on the philosophy of mind. Tufts philosophy professor Dennett (Consciousness ...

Dennett (Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking), co-director of the Center for Cognitive Studies at Tufts University, combines arguments from philosophy, biology, and informatics to explore ...

In the movie “Diner,” there is a moment when a teen out for a drive stops to gaze at a beautiful woman galloping through the countryside on her stallion. He turns to his friend and says, “Do you ever ...

An influential subset of philosophers has been debating 'zombies' for decades, and not the sort you see in horror movies and television shows. While the common conception of a zombie is of a ravenous, ...