Alvin Carl Plantinga

Plantinga in 2009
Born	(1932-11-15) November 15, 1932 (age 79) Ann Arbor, Michigan
Era	20th-century philosophy
Region	Western Philosophy
School	Analytic
Main interests	Epistemology, Metaphysics, Philosophy of Religion
Notable ideas	Reformed epistemology Free will defense Modal ontological argument Proper Function Reliabilism Evolutionary argument against naturalism
Influenced by Thomas Reid · Abraham Kuyper · Luis Molina · Duns Scotus · John Calvin
Influenced William Lane Craig

Alvin Carl Plantinga (born November 15, 1932) is an American analytic philosopher, the emeritus John A. O'Brien Professor of Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame and the inaugural holder of the Jellema Chair in Philosophy at Calvin College.

He is known for his work in philosophy of religion, epistemology, metaphysics and Christian apologetics. Plantinga is the author of a number of books including God and Other Minds (1967), The Nature of Necessity (1974), and the "warrant" series culminating in Warranted Christian Belief (2000). He has delivered the Gifford Lectures three times, and was described by Time magazine as "America's leading orthodox Protestant philosopher of God".^[1]

Biography[link]

Family[link]

Plantinga was born on November 15, 1932 in Ann Arbor, Michigan to Cornelius A. Plantinga (1908–1994) and Lettie G. Bossenbroek (1908–2007). Plantinga's father was a first generation immigrant, born in the Netherlands.^[2] His family is from the Dutch province of Friesland. Plantinga’s father earned a Ph.D. in philosophy from Duke University and a Master's Degree in psychology, and taught several academic subjects at different colleges over the years.^[3] One of Plantinga's brothers, Cornelius "Neal" Plantinga, Jr., is a theologian and the former president of Calvin Theological Seminary. Another of his brothers, Leon, is an emeritus professor of musicology at Yale University.^[3][4] His brother Terrell worked for CBS News.^[5]

In 1955, Plantinga married Kathleen De Boer.^[6] Plantinga and his wife have four children: Carl, Jane, Harry, and Ann.^[7][8] Both of his sons are professors at Calvin College, Carl in Film Studies^[9][10] and Harry in computer science.^[11] Harry is also the director of the college's Christian Classics Ethereal Library. Plantinga's older daughter, Jane Plantinga Pauw, is a pastor at Rainier Beach Presbyterian Church (PCUSA) in Seattle, Washington,^[12] and his younger daughter, Ann Kapteyn, is a missionary in Cameroon working for Wycliffe Bible Translators.^[13]

Education[link]

At the end of 11th grade, Plantinga's father urged Plantinga to skip his last year of high school and immediately enroll in college. Plantinga reluctantly followed his father's advice and in 1949, a few months before his 17th birthday, he enrolled in Jamestown College, in Jamestown, North Dakota.^[14][15] During that same year, his father accepted a teaching job at Calvin College, in Grand Rapids, Michigan. In January 1950, Plantinga moved to Grand Rapids with his family and enrolled in Calvin College. During his first semester at Calvin, Plantinga was awarded a scholarship to attend Harvard University.^[16] Beginning in the fall of 1950, Plantinga spent two semesters at Harvard. In 1951, during Harvard's spring recess, Plantinga attended a few philosophy classes at Calvin College, and was so impressed with Calvin philosophy professor William Harry Jellema that he returned 1951 to study philosophy under him.^[17] In 1954, Plantinga began his graduate studies at the University of Michigan where he studied under William Alston, William Frankena, and Richard Cartwright, among others.^[18] A year later, in 1955, he transferred to Yale University where he received his Ph.D. in 1958.^[19]

Teaching career[link]

Plantinga at the University of Notre Dame in 2004

Plantinga began his career as an instructor in the philosophy department at Yale in 1957, and then in 1958 he became a professor of philosophy at Wayne State University. In 1963, he accepted a teaching job at Calvin College, where he replaced the retiring Jellema.^[20] He then spent the next 19 years at Calvin before moving to the University of Notre Dame in 1982. He retired from the University of Notre Dame in 2010 and returned to Calvin College, where he serves as the first holder of the William Harry Jellema Chair in Philosophy.

Awards and honors[link]

Plantinga served as president of the American Philosophical Association, Western Division, 1981-1982.^[21] and as President of the Society of Christian Philosophers 1983-1986.^[15][22]

He has honorary degrees from Glasgow University (1982), Calvin College (1986), North Park College (1994), the Free University of Amsterdam (1995), Brigham Young University (1996), and Valparaiso University (1999).^[22]

He was a Guggenheim Fellow, 1971–1972, and elected a Fellow in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1975.^[22]

In 2006, the University of Notre Dame's Center for Philosophy of Religion renamed its Distinguished Scholar Fellowship as the Alvin Plantinga Fellowship.^[23] The fellowship includes an annual lecture by the current Plantinga Fellow.^[24]

Philosophical views[link]

Plantinga has argued that some people can know that God exists as a basic belief, requiring no argument. He has developed this argument in two different fashions: firstly, in God and Other Minds, by drawing an equivalence between the teleological argument and the common sense view that people have of other minds existing by analogy with their own minds.^[25][26] Plantinga has also developed a more comprehensive epistemological account of the nature of warrant which allows for the existence of God as a basic belief.^[27]

Plantinga has also argued that there is no logical inconsistency between the existence of evil and the existence of an all-powerful, all-knowing, wholly good God.^[28]

Problem of evil[link]

Plantinga's aim in the Free Will Defense is to show that the existence of an omniscient, omnipotent, wholly good God is not inconsistent with the existence of evil, as many philosophers have argued. According to Plantinga, "the central idea of the Free Will Defense [is] that even if God is omnipotent, there are nonetheless possible worlds he could not have actualized".^[29]

According to Chad Meister, professor of philosophy at Bethel College, most contemporary philosophers accept that the free will defense shows that it is logically possible for God and evil to co-exist, as long as a strong notion of free will is logically possible.^[30] The problem of evil is now commonly framed in evidential form which does not involve the claim that God and evil are logically contradictory or inconsistent.^[31][32] However, some philosophers continue to defend the cogency of the logical problem of evil.^[33]

Reformed epistemology[link]

Plantinga's contributions to epistemology include an argument which he dubs "Reformed epistemology". According to Reformed epistemology, belief in God can be rational and justified even without arguments or evidence for the existence of God. More specifically, Plantinga argues that belief in God is properly basic, and due to a religious externalist epistemology, he claims belief in God could be justified independently of evidence. His externalist epistemology, called "Proper functionalism", is a form of epistemological reliabilism.^[34]

Plantinga discusses his view of Reformed epistemology and Proper functionalism in a three volume series. In the first book of the trilogy, Warrant: The Current Debate, Plantinga introduces, analyzes, and criticizes 20th century developments in analytic epistemology, particularly the works of Chisholm, BonJour, Alston, Goldman, and others.^[35]

In the second book, Warrant and Proper Function, he introduces the notion of warrant as an alternative to justification and discusses topics like self-knowledge, memories, perception, and probability. Plantinga's proper function account argues that as a necessary condition of having warrant is that one's "belief-forming and belief-maintaining apparatus of powers" are functioning properly—"working the way it ought to work".^[36] Plantinga explains his argument for proper function with reference to a "design plan", as well as an environment in which one's cognitive equipment is optimal for use. Plantinga asserts that the design plan does not require a designer: "it is perhaps possible that evolution (undirected by God or anyone else) has somehow furnished us with our design plans",^[37] but the paradigm case of a design plan is like a technological product designed by a human being (like a radio or a wheel).

Plantinga seeks to defend this view of proper function against alternative views of proper function proposed by other philosophers which he groups together as 'naturalistic' including the 'functional generalization' view of John Pollock, the evolutionary/etiological account provided by Ruth Millikan, and a dispositional view held by John Bigelow and Robert Pargetter.^[38] Plantinga's evolutionary argument against naturalism is also discussed in the later chapters of Warrant and Proper Function.^[39]

In 2000, the third volume, Warranted Christian Belief, was published. Plantinga reintroduces his theory of warrant to ask whether Christian theistic belief can enjoy warrant. He argues that this is plausible. Notably, the book does not address whether or not Christian theism is true.

Modal ontological argument[link]

Plantinga has expressed a modal logic version of the ontological argument in which he uses modal logic to develop, in a more rigorous and formal way, Norman Malcolm's and Charles Hartshorne's modal ontological arguments.

Evolutionary argument against naturalism[link]

In Plantinga's evolutionary argument against naturalism, he argues that the truth of evolution is an epistemic defeater for naturalism (i.e. if evolution is true, it undermines naturalism). His basic argument is that if evolution and naturalism are both true, human cognitive faculties evolved to produce beliefs that have survival value (maximizing one's success at the four F's: "feeding, fleeing, fighting, and reproducing"), not necessarily to produce beliefs that are true. Thus, since human cognitive faculties are tuned to survival rather than truth in the naturalism-evolution model, there is reason to doubt the veracity of the products of those same faculties, including naturalism and evolution themselves. On the other hand, if God created man "in his image" by way of an evolutionary process (or any other means), then Plantinga argues our faculties would probably be reliable.

The argument does not assume any necessary correlation (or uncorrelation) between true beliefs and survival. Making the contrary assumption—that there is in fact a relatively strong correlation between truth and survival—if human belief-forming apparatus evolved giving a survival advantage, then it ought to yield truth since true beliefs confer a survival advantage. Plantinga counters that, while there may be overlap between true beliefs and beliefs that contribute to survival, the two kinds of beliefs are not the same, and he gives the following example with a man named Paul:

Evolution and Christianity[link]

In the past, Plantinga has lent support to the intelligent design movement.^[41] He was a member of the 'Ad Hoc Origins Committee' that supported Philip E. Johnson's book Darwin on Trial against palaeontologist Stephen Jay Gould's high profile scathing review in Scientific American in 1992.^[42] Plantinga also provided a back-cover endorsement of Johnson's book.^[43] He was a Fellow of the (now moribund) pro-intelligent design International Society for Complexity, Information, and Design,^[44] and has presented at a number of intelligent design conferences.^[45]

In a March 2010 article in the Chronicle of Higher Education, philosopher of science Michael Ruse claims that Plantinga is an "open enthusiast of intelligent design".^[46] In a letter to the editor, Plantinga has the following response:

Like any Christian (and indeed any theist), I believe that the world has been created by God, and hence "intelligently designed". The hallmark of intelligent design, however, is the claim that this can be shown scientifically; I'm dubious about that. ...As far as I can see, God certainly could have used Darwinian processes to create the living world and direct it as he wanted to go; hence evolution as such does not imply that there is no direction in the history of life. What does have that implication is not evolutionary theory itself, but unguided evolution, the idea that neither God nor any other person has taken a hand in guiding, directing or orchestrating the course of evolution. But the scientific theory of evolution, sensibly enough, says nothing one way or the other about divine guidance. It doesn't say that evolution is divinely guided; it also doesn't say that it isn't. Like almost any theist, I reject unguided evolution; but the contemporary scientific theory of evolution just as such—apart from philosophical or theological add-ons—doesn't say that evolution is unguided. Like science in general, it makes no pronouncements on the existence or activity of God.^[47]

Selected works by Plantinga[link]

• God and Other Minds. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. 1967. rev. ed., 1990. ISBN 0-8014-9735-3
• The Nature of Necessity. Oxford: Clarendon Press. 1974. ISBN 0-19-824404-5
• God, Freedom, and Evil. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans. 1974. ISBN 0-04-100040-4
• Does God Have A Nature? Wisconsin: Marquette University Press. 1980. ISBN 0-87462-145-3
• Faith and Rationality: Reason and Belief in God (ed. with Nicholas Wolterstorff). Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press. 1983. ISBN 0-268-00964-3
• Warrant: the Current Debate. New York: Oxford University Press. 1993. ISBN 0-19-507861-6 (1987-1988 Gifford Lectures), online
• Warrant and Proper Function. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 1993. ISBN 0-19-507863-2 (1987-1988 Gifford Lectures), online
• Warranted Christian Belief. New York: Oxford University Press. 2000. ISBN 0-19-513192-4 online
• Essays in the Metaphysics of Modality (ed.) Matthew Davidson. New York: Oxford University Press. 2003. ISBN 0-19-510376-9
• Knowledge of God (with Michael Tooley). Oxford: Blackwell. 2008. ISBN 0-631-19364-2
• Science and Religion (with Daniel Dennett). Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2010 ISBN 0-19-973842-4
• Where the Conflict Really Lies: Science, Religion, and Naturalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2011. ISBN 0-19-981209-8

See also[link]

Philosophy portal

• American philosophy
• List of American philosophers

Notes[link]

References[link]

• "Self-profile" in Alvin Plantinga, James Tomberlin and Peter van Inwagen ed., (Dordrecht: D. Riedle Pub. Co.), 1985
• Forrest, Barbara; Gross, Paul R. (8 January 2004). Creationism's Trojan Horse. Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-515742-7. 
• Mackie, J.L (1982). The Miracle of Theism: Arguments for and Against the Existence of God. Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-824682-X. 
• Meister, Chad (2009). Introducing Philosophy of Religion. Routledge. ISBN 978-0-415-40327-6. 

Books about Plantinga[link]

• Baker, Deane-Peter (ed), Alvin Plantinga (Contemporary Philosophy in Focus Series). New York: Cambridge University Press. 2007.
• Mascrod, Keith, Alvin Plantinga and Christian Apologetics. Wipf & Stock. 2007.
• Crisp, Thomas, Matthew Davidson, David Vander Laan (eds), Knowledge and Reality: Essays in Honor of Alvin Plantinga. Dordrecht: Springer. 2006.
• Beilby, James, Epistemology as Theology: An Evaluation of Alvin Plantinga's Religious Epistemology. Aldershot: Ashgate. 2005
• Beilby, James (ed), Naturalism Defeated? Essays on Plantinga's Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. 2002.
• Sennet, James (ed), The Analytic Theist: An Alvin Plantinga Reader. Grand Rapids: Eeardman. 1998. ISBN 0-8028-4229-1
• Kvanvig, Jonathan (ed), Warrant in Contemporary Epistemology: Essays in Honor of Plantinga's Theory of Knowledge. Savage, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield. 1996.
• McLeod, Mark S. Rationality and Theistic Belief: An Essay on Reformed Epistemology (Cornell Studies in the Philosophy of Religion). Ithaca: Cornell University Press. 1993.
• Zagzebski, Linda (ed), Rational Faith. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press. 1993.
• Sennett, James, Modality, Probability, and Rationality: A Critical Examination of Alvin Plantinga's Philosophy. New York: P. Lang. 1992.
• Hoitenga, Dewey, From Plato to Plantinga: An Introduction to Reformed Epistemology. Albany: State University of New York Press. 1991.
• Parsons, Keith, God and the Burden of Proof: Plantinga, Swinburne, and the Analytic Defense of Theism. Buffalo, New York: Prometheus Books. 1989.
• Tomberlin, James and Peter van Inwagen (eds), Alvin Plantinga (Profiles V.5). Dordrecht: D. Reidel. 1985.

External links[link]

• Alvin Plantinga's faculty page at the University of Notre Dame
• Plantinga's Curriculum Vitae
• Virtual Library of Christian Philosophy a collection of some of Plantinga's papers
• Interviews from the PBS program Closer to Truth
• "The Dawkins Confusion", Plantinga's review of Richard Dawkins's The God Delusion from Books and Culture magazine
• Alvin Plantinga: The Analytic Theist more papers by Plantinga
• Alvin Plantinga's spiritual autobiography
• Warrant: The Current Debate Plantinga's Gifford Lecture, and volume 1 of his trilogy on warrant.
• Warrant and Proper Function Plantinga's Gifford Lecture, and volume 2 of the warrant trilogy.
• Warranted Christian Belief, full electronic text of volume 3 of the Warrant trilogy.
• Daniel C. Dennett and Alvin Plantinga, Science and Religion: Are They Compatible? (Oxford University Press, 2011)

Daniel Clement Dennett

Born	(1942-03-28) March 28, 1942 (age 70) Boston, Massachusetts
Era	20th / 21st-century philosophy
Region	Western Philosophy
School	Analytic philosophy
Main interests	Philosophy of mind Philosophy of biology Philosophy of science Cognitive science
Notable ideas	Heterophenomenology Intentional stance Intuition pump Multiple Drafts Model Greedy reductionism Deepity
Influenced by David Hume  · Charles Darwin Ludwig Wittgenstein  · Gilbert Ryle W. V. Quine  · Alan Turing  · Wilfrid Sellars Noam Chomsky  · Richard Dawkins
Influenced Richard Dawkins  · Douglas Hofstadter  · Geoffrey Miller

Daniel Clement Dennett (born March 28, 1942)^[1][2] is an American philosopher, writer and cognitive scientist whose research centers on the philosophy of mind, philosophy of science and philosophy of biology, particularly as those fields relate to evolutionary biology and cognitive science.^[3] He is currently the Co-director of the Center for Cognitive Studies, the Austin B. Fletcher Professor of Philosophy, and a University Professor at Tufts University. Dennett is a firm atheist and secularist, a member of the Secular Coalition for America advisory board,^[4] as well as an outspoken supporter of the Brights movement. Dennett is referred to as one of the "Four Horsemen of New Atheism," along with Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and the late Christopher Hitchens.^[5]

Early life and education[link]

Born in Boston, Massachusetts, Dennett spent part of his childhood in Lebanon, where, during World War II, his father was a covert counter-intelligence agent with the Office of Strategic Services posing as a cultural attaché to the American Embassy in Beirut.^[6] When he was five, his mother took him back to Massachusetts after his father died in an unexplained plane crash.^[7] His sister is the investigative journalist Charlotte Dennett.^[6]

He attended Phillips Exeter Academy and spent one year at Wesleyan University before receiving his Bachelor of Arts in philosophy from Harvard University in 1963, where he was a student of W. V. Quine. In 1965, he received his Doctor of Philosophy in philosophy from the University of Oxford, where he studied under Gilbert Ryle and was a member of Hertford College.

Academic career[link]

Daniel Dennett in 2008

As of January 2012, Dennett is the Austin B. Fletcher Professor of Philosophy, University Professor, and Co-Director of the Center for Cognitive Studies (with Ray Jackendoff) at Tufts University.^[8]

Dennett describes himself as "an autodidact — or, more properly, the beneficiary of hundreds of hours of informal tutorials on all the fields that interest me, from some of the world's leading scientists."^[9]

He is the recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship, two Guggenheim Fellowships, and a Fellowship at the Center for Advanced Studies in Behavioral Science.^[10] He is a Fellow of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry and a Humanist Laureate of the International Academy of Humanism.^[11] He was named 2004 Humanist of the Year by the American Humanist Association.^[12]

In February 2010 he was named to the Freedom From Religion Foundation's Honorary Board of distinguished achievers.^[13]

In 2012 he was awarded the Erasmus Prize, an annual award for a person who has made an exceptional contribution to European culture, society or social science, "for his ability to translate the cultural significance of science and technology to a broad audience."^[14]

Free will[link]

While he is a confirmed compatibilist on free will, in "On Giving Libertarians What They Say They Want" — Chapter 15 of his 1978 book Brainstorms,^[15] Dennett articulated the case for a two-stage model of decision making in contrast to libertarian views.

The model of decision making I am proposing has the following feature: when we are faced with an important decision, a consideration-generator whose output is to some degree undetermined produces a series of considerations, some of which may of course be immediately rejected as irrelevant by the agent (consciously or unconsciously). Those considerations that are selected by the agent as having a more than negligible bearing on the decision then figure in a reasoning process, and if the agent is in the main reasonable, those considerations ultimately serve as predictors and explicators of the agent's final decision.^[16]

While other philosophers have developed two-stage models, including William James, Henri Poincaré, Arthur Holly Compton, and Henry Margenau, Dennett defends this model for the following reasons:

1. First...The intelligent selection, rejection, and weighing of the considerations that do occur to the subject is a matter of intelligence making the difference.
2. Second, I think it installs indeterminism in the right place for the libertarian, if there is a right place at all.
3. Third...from the point of view of biological engineering, it is just more efficient and in the end more rational that decision making should occur in this way.
4. A fourth observation in favor of the model is that it permits moral education to make a difference, without making all of the difference.
5. Fifth — and I think this is perhaps the most important thing to be said in favor of this model — it provides some account of our important intuition that we are the authors of our moral decisions.
6. Finally, the model I propose points to the multiplicity of decisions that encircle our moral decisions and suggests that in many cases our ultimate decision as to which way to act is less important phenomenologically as a contributor to our sense of free will than the prior decisions affecting our deliberation process itself: the decision, for instance, not to consider any further, to terminate deliberation; or the decision to ignore certain lines of inquiry.

These prior and subsidiary decisions contribute, I think, to our sense of ourselves as responsible free agents, roughly in the following way: I am faced with an important decision to make, and after a certain amount of deliberation, I say to myself: "That's enough. I've considered this matter enough and now I'm going to act," in the full knowledge that I could have considered further, in the full knowledge that the eventualities may prove that I decided in error, but with the acceptance of responsibility in any case.^[17]

Leading libertarian philosophers such as Robert Kane have rejected Dennett's model, specifically that random chance is directly involved in a decision, on the basis that they believe this eliminates the agent's motives and reasons, character and values, and feelings and desires. They claim that, if chance is the primary cause of decisions, then agents cannot be liable for resultant actions. Kane says:

[As Dennett admits,] a causal indeterminist view of this deliberative kind does not give us everything libertarians have wanted from free will. For [the agent] does not have complete control over what chance images and other thoughts enter his mind or influence his deliberation. They simply come as they please. [The agent] does have some control after the chance considerations have occurred.

But then there is no more chance involved. What happens from then on, how he reacts, is determined by desires and beliefs he already has. So it appears that he does not have control in the libertarian sense of what happens after the chance considerations occur as well. Libertarians require more than this for full responsibility and free will.^[18]

Other philosophical views[link]

Dennett has remarked in several places (such as "Self-portrait", in Brainchildren) that his overall philosophical project has remained largely the same since his time at Oxford. He is primarily concerned with providing a philosophy of mind that is grounded in empirical research. In his original dissertation, Content and Consciousness, he broke up the problem of explaining the mind into the need for a theory of content and for a theory of consciousness. His approach to this project has also stayed true to this distinction. Just as Content and Consciousness has a bipartite structure, he similarly divided Brainstorms into two sections. He would later collect several essays on content in The Intentional stance and synthesize his views on consciousness into a unified theory in Consciousness Explained. These volumes respectively form the most extensive development of his views.^[19]

In Consciousness Explained, Dennett's interest in the ability of evolution to explain some of the content-producing features of consciousness is already apparent, and this has since become an integral part of his program. He defends a theory known by some as Neural Darwinism. He also presents an argument against qualia; he argues that the concept is so confused that it cannot be put to any use or understood in any non-contradictory way, and therefore does not constitute a valid refutation of physicalism. His strategy mirrors his teacher Ryle's approach of redefining first person phenomena in third person terms, and denying the coherence of the concepts which this approach struggles with. Much of Dennett's work since the 1990s has been concerned with fleshing out his previous ideas by addressing the same topics from an evolutionary standpoint, from what distinguishes human minds from animal minds (Kinds of Minds), to how free will is compatible with a naturalist view of the world (Freedom Evolves). In his 2006 book, Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon, Dennett attempts to subject religious belief to the same treatment, explaining possible evolutionary reasons for the phenomenon of religious adherence.

Dennett self-identifies with a few terms:

[Others] note that my 'avoidance of the standard philosophical terminology for discussing such matters' often creates problems for me; philosophers have a hard time figuring out what I am saying and what I am denying. My refusal to play ball with my colleagues is deliberate, of course, since I view the standard philosophical terminology as worse than useless — a major obstacle to progress since it consists of so many errors.

— Daniel Dennett, The Message is: There is no Medium

Yet, in Consciousness Explained, he admits "I am a sort of 'teleofunctionalist', of course, perhaps the original teleofunctionalist'". He goes on to say, "I am ready to come out of the closet as some sort of verificationist". In Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon he admits to being "a bright", and defends the term.

In Darwin's Dangerous Idea, Dennett writes that evolution can account for the origin of morality. He rejects the idea of the naturalistic fallacy as the idea that ethics is in some free-floating realm, writing that the fallacy is to rush from facts to values.

Role in evolutionary debate[link]

Dennett sees evolution by natural selection as an algorithmic process (though he spells out that algorithms as simple as long division often incorporate a significant degree of randomness).^[20] This idea is in conflict with the evolutionary philosophy of paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould, who preferred to stress the "pluralism" of evolution (i.e. its dependence on many crucial factors, of which natural selection is only one).

Dennett's views on evolution are identified as being strongly adaptationist, in line with his theory of the intentional stance, and the evolutionary views of biologist Richard Dawkins. In Darwin's Dangerous Idea, Dennett showed himself even more willing than Dawkins to defend adaptationism in print, devoting an entire chapter to a criticism of the ideas of Gould. This stems from Gould's long-running public debate with E. O. Wilson and other evolutionary biologists over human sociobiology and its descendant evolutionary psychology, which Gould and Richard Lewontin opposed, but which Dennett advocated, together with Dawkins and Steven Pinker.^[21] Strong disagreements have been launched against Dennett from Gould and his supporters, who allege that Dennett overstated his claims and misrepresented Gould's to reinforce what Gould describes as Dennett's "Darwinian fundamentalism".^[22]

Dennett's theories have had a significant influence on the work of evolutionary psychologist Geoffrey Miller. He has also written about and advocated the notion of memetics as a philosophically useful tool, most recently in his "Brains, Computers, and Minds," a three part presentation through Harvard's MBB 2009 Distinguished Lecture Series.

He has recently been doing research into clerics who are secretly atheists and how they rationalize their works. He found what he called a "Don't ask, don't tell" conspiracy because believers did not want to hear of loss of faith. That made unbelieving preachers feel isolated but they did not want to lose their jobs and sometimes their church-supplied lodgings and generally consoled themselves that they were doing good in their pastoral roles by providing comfort and required ritual.^[23] The research, with Linda LaScola, was further extended to include other denominations and non-Christian clerics.^[24]

Personal life[link]

Dennett in Tahiti in 1984

Dennett lives with his wife in North Andover, Massachusetts, and has a daughter, a son, and three grandchildren.^[25] He is also an avid sailor.

In October 2006, Dennett was hospitalized due to an aortic dissection. After a nine-hour surgery, he was given a new aorta. In an essay posted on the Edge website, Dennett gives his firsthand account of his health problems, his consequent feelings of gratitude towards the scientists, cardiologist, surgeons, EMT's, phlebotomists, orderlies, housekeepers, physician assistants, X-ray technicians, meal-bringers, launderers, physical therapists, perfusionist, neurologist, and nurses whose hard work made his recovery possible, and his complete lack of a "deathbed conversion".

To whom, then, do I owe a debt of gratitude? To the cardiologist who has kept me alive and ticking for years, and who swiftly and confidently rejected the original diagnosis of nothing worse than pneumonia. To the surgeons, neurologists, anesthesiologists, and the perfusionist, who kept my systems going for many hours under daunting circumstances. To the dozen or so physician assistants, and to nurses and physical therapists and x-ray technicians and a small army of phlebotomists so deft that you hardly know they are drawing your blood, and the people who brought the meals, kept my room clean, did the mountains of laundry generated by such a messy case, wheel-chaired me to x-ray, and so forth. These people came from Uganda, Kenya, Liberia, Haiti, the Philippines, Croatia, Russia, China, Korea, India—and the United States, of course—and I have never seen more impressive mutual respect, as they helped each other out and checked each other's work. But for all their teamwork, this local gang could not have done their jobs without the huge background of contributions from others. I remember with gratitude my late friend and Tufts colleague, physicist Allan Cormack, who shared the Nobel Prize for his invention of the c-t scanner. Allan—you have posthumously saved yet another life, but who's counting? The world is better for the work you did. Thank goodness. Then there is the whole system of medicine, both the science and the technology, without which the best-intentioned efforts of individuals would be roughly useless. So I am grateful to the editorial boards and referees, past and present, of Science, Nature, Journal of the American Medical Association, Lancet, and all the other institutions of science and medicine that keep churning out improvements, detecting and correcting flaws.

— Daniel C. Dennett, Thank Goodness!

By his account, upon having been told by friends and relatives that they had prayed for him, he resisted the urge to ask them, "Did you also sacrifice a goat?"^[26][27]

Selected books[link]

• Brainstorms: Philosophical Essays on Mind and Psychology (MIT Press 1981) (ISBN 0-262-54037-1)
• Elbow Room: The Varieties of Free Will Worth Wanting (MIT Press 1984) — on free will and determinism (ISBN 0-262-04077-8)
• The Mind's I (Bantam, Reissue edition 1985, with Douglas Hofstadter) (ISBN 0-553-34584-2)
• Content and Consciousness (Routledge & Kegan Paul Books Ltd; 2nd ed. January 1986) (ISBN 0-7102-0846-4)
• The Intentional Stance (6th printing), Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1996, ISBN 0-262-54053-3  (First published 1987)
• Consciousness Explained (Back Bay Books 1992) (ISBN 0-316-18066-1)
• Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life (Simon & Schuster; reprint edition 1996) (ISBN 0-684-82471-X)
• Kinds of Minds: Towards an Understanding of Consciousness (Basic Books 1997) (ISBN 0-465-07351-4)
• Brainchildren: Essays on Designing Minds (Representation and Mind) (MIT Press 1998) (ISBN 0-262-04166-9) — A Collection of Essays 1984–1996
• Freedom Evolves (Viking Press 2003) (ISBN 0-670-03186-0)
• Sweet Dreams: Philosophical Obstacles to a Science of Consciousness (MIT Press 2005) (ISBN 0-262-04225-8)
• Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon (Penguin Group 2006) (ISBN 0-670-03472-X).
• Neuroscience and Philosophy: Brain, Mind, and Language (Columbia University Press 2007) (ISBN 978-0-231-14044-7), co-authored with Maxwell Bennett, Peter Hacker, and John Searle
• Science and Religion (Oxford University Press 2010) (ISBN 0-199-73842-4), co-authored with Alvin Plantinga

See also[link]

Thinking portal

• The Atheism Tapes
• Cartesian materialism
• Conscious Robots
• Evolutionary psychology of religion
• Greedy reductionism
• Geoffrey Miller
• Heterophenomenology
• Intentional stance
• List of Jean Nicod Prize laureates
• Memetics
• Multiple drafts theory of consciousness
• Philosophy of Religion
• American philosophy
• List of American philosophers

Further reading[link]

• John Brockman (1995). The Third Culture. New York: Simon & Schuster. ISBN 0-684-80359-3 (Discusses Dennett and others).
• Daniel C. Dennett (1997), "Chapter 3. True Believers: The Intentional Strategy and Why it Works", in John Haugeland, Mind Design II: Philosophy, Psychology, Artificial Intelligence. Massachusetts: Massachusetts Institute of Technology. ISBN 0-262-08259-4 (reprint of 1981 publication).^[a]
• Andrew Brook and Don Ross (editors) (2000). Daniel Dennett. New York: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-00864-6
• Don Ross, Andrew Brook and David Thompson (editors) (2000) Dennett's Philosophy: A Comprehensive Assessment Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press. ISBN 0-262-18200-9
• John Symons (2000) On Dennett. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Publishing Company. ISBN 0-534-57632-X
• Matthew Elton (2003). Dennett: Reconciling Science and Our Self-Conception. Cambridge, U.K: Polity Press. ISBN 0-7456-2117-1
• P.M.S. Hacker and M.R. Bennett (2003) Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience. Oxford, and Malden, Mass: Blackwell ISBN 1-4051-0855-X (Has an appendix devoted to a strong critique of Dennett's philosophy of mind)

Notes[link]

References[link]

External links[link]

This article's use of external links may not follow Wikipedia's policies or guidelines. Please improve this article by removing excessive or inappropriate external links, and converting useful links where appropriate into footnote references. (October 2011)

Wikisource has original works written by or about: Daniel Dennett

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Daniel Dennett

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Daniel Dennett

• Inside Jokes Using Humor to Reverse-Engineer the Mind Matthew M. Hurley, Daniel C. Dennett and Reginald B. Adams, Jr at The MIT Press
• Faculty webpage
• Daniel C. Dennett at Internet Movie Database
• Scientific American Frontiers Profile: Daniel Dennett 2000-12-19
• Searchable bibliography of Dennett's works
• Daniel Dennett on Information Philosopher

Media

• Edge/Third Culture: Daniel C. Dennett
• Daniel Dennett multimedia files
• Profile at TED several videos on dangerous memes, consciousness, others
• Radio interview on Philosophy Talk 2009-12-06
• The Nature of Knowledge Lecture at the University of Edinburgh 2006-03-14
• On Preaching and Teaching The Science Network interview with Daniel Dennett 2007-11-02
• The Moscow Center for Consciousness Studies video interview with Daniel Dennett 2010-03-05 (with transcript)

v t e Daniel Dennett Concepts Cartesian theater Greedy reductionism Heterophenomenology Intentional stance Intuition pump Multiple Drafts Model Selected works Brainstorms (1981) The Mind's I (1981) Elbow Room (1984) Consciousness Explained (1991) Darwin's Dangerous Idea (1995) Freedom Evolves (2003) Sweet Dreams (2005) Breaking the Spell (2006)