Search Results

“... There was language long before there was writing, a fact that we literate investigators tend to underestimate. Today we are building the information superhighway, and for several millennia the written word has been a primary medium of cultural transmission, but for at least a thousand millennia before that, the main medium of information transfer from generation to generation was the well-beaten path of word of mouth ...”

“... broadest possible sense of the term hang together in the broadest possible sense of the term’.Daniel Dennett, who died in April, spent much of his career examining matters that populate ordinary thinking about the mind: beliefs, pain, consciousness, free will, the self. He sought to reconcile these aspects of the mind with the scientific story, to ...”

“... was the misguidedness, stupidity and sometimes dangerousness of religious belief. Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens: over the previous few years each had published a bestselling book condemning religion, and they were all rather pleased with themselves. Dawkins’s The God Delusion alone, with its compelling argument ...”

“... convictions like ninepins, and was rightly taken as the showpiece of post-war British philosophy. Daniel Dennett, who was one of Ryle’s students, has spent the last twenty-five years writing about the topic – consciousness – which has always been the great obstacle to the acceptance of Ryle’s non-Cartesian account of mind. Most of this ...”

“... Both this and the following statement are false. Douglas Hofstadter and Daniel Dennett’s book is well worth £9.95. One does not have to be a philosopher to realise that I have already gone further than a humble book-reviewer should. The value of the book under review is, you might think, a matter of opinion ...”

“... thing? Been feeling that the laws of nature are pushing you around? Here’s a book-length dose of Daniel Dennett’s Cold Comfort Cure. According to Dennett, ‘naturalism is no enemy of free will; it provides a positive account of free will.’ Sound too good to be true? Well, so it is. Proposals for ...”

“... rational agents with beliefs, desires, and mental representations of the world. We adopt what Dan Dennett, the distinguished American philosopher of mind, refers to as the ‘intentional stance’ towards them. His latest collection of papers is a series of ruminations on quite what we are doing. At the core of our stance is the assumption that mental states ...”

“... up over the final overhang – and collapses into a company of picnickers. Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris motored up to his chosen summit a while ago; and here, sure enough, stepping forward to pat the newcomer on the back and welcome him along, who should it be but Philip Pullman? ‘Magnificent … a ...”

“... has suggested that we look at the brain and ask how we would make an instrument like that. So has Daniel Dennett. But for Rose, the question is simply historical: observe as best we can, with a bit of imagination, how simple, slightly brainy creatures evolved into increasingly complex systems. Not just humans, and not just mammals: observe how different ...”

“... Skarda, have actually relocated themselves within neuroscience laboratories; others, like Daniel Dennett and even John Searle, are content to observe closely from the outside. While this attention to the brain has shifted the centre of gravity of the mind/brain debate, it has hardly reduced the vigour of the polemic that has ensued among both ...”

“... should be attacked from a different direction. Bo Dahlbom is right, in his 1993 critique of Daniel Dennett, to insist on the social character of ‘mind’. Theories of mind are obviously conditioned by their historical context: Fredric Jameson recently proposed a reading of Dennett’s Consciousness Explained as ...”

“... messages: ‘That route has been taken for two thousand years, from Aristotle to John Searle and Daniel Dennett. Pain has been used repeatedly as the simplest possible example of a physical stimulus which inevitably results in a mental response. We will not retrace this route, dropping the names of Bacon, Hume, Berkeley, Kant and Wittgenstein ... Nor ...”

“... but that they weren’t very good on the subject of matter. Aquinas believed in the soul, as Daniel Dennett and Richard Dawkins do not; but one reason he did so was because he thought it yielded the richest possible understanding of the lump of matter known as the body. As Wittgenstein once remarked: if you want an image of the soul, look at the ...”

“... has got their own story that is so unique’; ‘We are all virtuoso novelists,’ the philosopher Daniel Dennett wrote. What Brooks glumly calls ‘the narrative takeover of reality’ was complete. It isn’t just that everyone now has a story; it’s that everyone is a story. Who you are is the narrative you recount about yourself. Whether the life ...”

“... also liked to call qualia ‘raw feels’. Raw as opposed to cooked? The concept was a mess, as Daniel Dennett and others were witheringly effective in pointing out. But the notion of qualia, seen as separate from the idea of consciousness, did have one good feature: it naturally accommodated the idea that there might be a kind of feeling present in an ...”