Daniel C. Dennett, Director
Center for Cognitive Studies
Emeritus University Professor and Austin B. Fletcher Professor of Philosophy
Daniel C. Dennett is the author of From Bacteria to Bach and Back (2017), Consciousness Explained (1991) and Darwin’s Dangerous Idea (Simon & Schuster, 1995), and many other books. He lives with his wife in Maine, and has a daughter, a son, and six grandchildren. He was born in Boston in 1942, the son of a historian by the same name, and received his B.A. in philosophy from Harvard in 1963. He then went to Oxford to work with Gilbert Ryle, under whose supervision he completed the D.Phil. in philosophy in 1965. He taught at U.C. Irvine from 1965 to 1971, when he moved to Tufts, where he has taught ever since, aside from periods visiting at Harvard, Pittsburgh, Oxford, the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, the London School of Economics and the American University of Beirut. He is currently a member of the external faculty of the Santa Fe Institute and New College of the Humanities in London.
He is the author of over four hundred scholarly articles on various aspects on the mind, published in journals ranging from Artificial Intelligence and Behavioral and Brain Sciences to Poetics Today and The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism.
He gave the John Locke Lectures at Oxford in 1983, the Gavin David Young Lectures at Adelaide, Australia, in 1985, and the Tanner Lecture at Michigan in 1986, among many others. He has received two Guggenheim Fellowships, a Fulbright Fellowship, and a Fellowship at the Center for Advanced Studies in Behavioral Science. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1987. He was awarded the Erasmus Prize, The Netherlands highest honor, in 2012.
- Interesting links (and tributes to Dan Dennett)
- CD with Scott Johnson
- Tati
- Review of Underdonk Gallery Art Show
- The New Yorker Profile
- The Quintessence of Dust – Consciousness Explained, at Thirty, by Jared Warren
- Lovers of the Consequence Argument
- The Unbelieving
He was the Co-founder (in 1985) and Co-director of the Curricular Software Studio at Tufts, and has helped to design museum exhibits on computers for the Smithsonian Institution, the Museum of Science in Boston, and the Computer Museum in Boston.
In 2014, after more than forty summers hobby farming in Maine, he sold his farm and bought a house on an island in Maine, where he can pursue less strenuous activities while continuing his research. His autobiography, I’ve Been Thinking, was published in October, 2023.
Mailing Address:
Center for Cognitive Studies
115 Miner Hall
Tufts University
Medford, MA 02155 USA
telephone: (617) 627-3297
Fax: (617) 627-3952
Email: daniel.dennett@tufts.edu