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Birth of Daniel Dennett
Daniel Clement Dennett III was born during the Second World War, in Boston Massachusetts on March 28th,1942. His father, Daniel C. Dennett Jr. was a professor of Islamic studies and was recruited to serve overseas as a secret agent for the forerunner of the Central Intelligence Agency, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS). NewYorker -
Childhood Abroad
Daniel spent his early years in Beirut where his father (seen here in the photo) continued to serve as an OSS agent under the guise of a U.S. embassy Attaché. While living in Beirut, he learned to speak Arabic and had a pet gazelle named Babar. His father died in a questionable plane crash while on a oil pipeline reconnaissance mission in 1947. Daniel, his mother and younger sister returned home to Boston following the death of their father. -
Content and Consciousness
In 1969, while completing his DPh at Oxford, Dennett published his first book on philosophy titled Content and Consciousness. The published work explored the age old philosophical question of how our minds interact with our bodies (the mind-body connection). -
Tufts University
Dennett began his current tenure at Tufts University, where he is a University Professor and Austin B. Fletcher Professor of Philosophy, and Director of the Center for Cognitive Studies. He continues to teach philosophy after over 40 years of teaching and currently resides in Maine. Tufts -
Dangerous Ideas
One of Dennett's key philosophical concepts is that learning is dependent on time and memory, "being able to extract information from the past and apply it to your future." That concept and several other tenets of his philosophy are highlighted in this YouTube video. YouTube
