Daniel Dennett
Daniel Dennett
Daniel Clement Dennett III 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...
ProfessionPhilosopher
Date of Birth28 March 1942
Daniel Dennett quotes about
mistake chiefs tricks
The chief trick to making good mistakes is not to hide them-especially not from yourself.
mistake opportunity practice
Try to acquire the weird practice of savoring your mistakes, delighting in uncovering the strange quirks that led you astray. Then, when you have sucked out all the goodness to be gained from having made them, you can cheerfully forget them and go on to the next big opportunity.
atheist atheism firsts
You don't get to advertise all the good that your religion does without first scrupulously subtracting all the harm it does and considering seriously the question of whether some other religion, or no religion at all, does better.
caring best-effort society
The only meaning of life worth caring about is one that can withstand our best efforts to examine it.
technology understanding pace
Thanks to technology, what almost anybody can do has been multiplied a thousandfold, and our moral understanding about what we ought to do hasn't kept pace.
knowledge may limits
There may be things that are completely unknowable to us, so we must be careful not to treat the limits of our knowledge as sure guides to the limit of what there is.
atheist art looks
I look around the world and see so many wonderful things that I love and enjoy and benefit from, whether it's art or music or clothing or food and all the rest. And I'd like to add a little to that goodness.
mistake giving risk
Sometimes you don’t just want to risk making mistakes; you actually want to make them - if only to give you something clear and detailed to fix.
atheist religion president
We have had plenty of atheist presidents; they just wouldn't admit it.
dangerous-ideas cards-on-the-table law
Let me lay my cards on the table. If I were to give an award for the single best idea anyone ever had, I'd give it to Darwin, ahead of even Newton or Einstein and everyone else. In a single stroke, the idea of evolution by natural selection unifies the realm of life, meaning and purpose with the realm of space and time, cause and effect, mechanism and physical law. It is not just a wonderful idea. It is a dangerous idea.
memes
Words are memes that can be pronounced.
illusion found phenomenon
Human freedom is not an illusion; it is an objective phenomenon, distinct from all other biological conditions and found in only one species - us.
evolution language genealogy
Words have a genealogy and it's easier to trace the evolution of a single word than the evolution of a language.
yarn brain accuracy
It is not so much that we, using our brains, spin our yarns, as that our brains, using yarns, spin us.