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Daniel Dennett

Analytic · North America · 1942 to 2024

American philosopher who explained the mind through the workings of the brain, and spoke openly for a secular view of religion.

What it is

Daniel Dennett (1942 to 2024) was an American philosopher who worked mainly on the mind and consciousness. He took a materialist view of the mind, and he became a prominent figure in the atheist movement in the early twenty-first century.

He was born in Boston, studied philosophy at Harvard, and then went to Oxford, where he studied under Gilbert Ryle and received his doctorate in 1965. He taught for a few years at the University of California, Irvine, and from 1971 at Tufts University, where he stayed for the rest of his career.

The main ideas

  • A material mind. He held a materialist view of the mind, and he tried to build accounts of consciousness on strictly material grounds.
  • Philosophy that listens to science. He worked at the meeting point of philosophy and cognitive science, drawing on artificial intelligence, neuroscience and psychology, not only on the old arguments of philosophers.
  • Evolution explains the brain. He asked how natural selection could produce the brain and with it consciousness. Two of his books, Consciousness Explained and Darwin's Dangerous Idea, pursue this.
  • Religion as something that arose naturally. He proposed that religious belief can be explained by evolution, and he treated religion as one natural phenomenon among many.
  • Open about his own view. He said openly that he was an atheist, and he was counted among the 'Four Horsemen' of the New Atheism, along with Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens.

What it looks like in practice

Picture someone who sees a shape move in the dark and feels sure that something is there. Dennett would ask how a habit of finding a person or an intention behind a puzzling event could have arisen by natural means. The example is an illustration of his line of thought, not a passage from his books.

Books and moments

  • Content and Consciousness (1969) was an early book, on the mind and consciousness.
  • The Intentional Stance (1987) collects his writing on how mental states have content.
  • Consciousness Explained (1991) sets out his material account of consciousness.
  • Darwin's Dangerous Idea (1995) explores natural selection and the evolution of the brain and consciousness.
  • Breaking the Spell (2006) asks how religion could have arisen as a natural phenomenon.
  • From the 1990s he took part in a project at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology that tried to build a robot named Cog, aimed at being intelligent and perhaps even conscious.
  • He took part in a discussion with the Christian philosopher Alvin Plantinga that was published as Science and Religion: Are They Compatible?

Questions and criticism

  • Is it accepted? Critics can ask whether strictly material accounts of consciousness explain what it is like to have an experience, or only how a brain behaves.
  • Explaining religion. Showing how belief could arise naturally does not by itself show that the belief is false. Whether an account of where a belief comes from bears on whether it is true is an open question.
  • A fair hearing. Because he was a forceful public critic of religion, it is fair to ask how well his arguments hold up when read apart from the argument over atheism.

Close neighbours

Gilbert Ryle, his teacher at Oxford, has a page on this site. So does Alvin Plantinga, who took the opposite side in a published discussion with him about science and religion.

Written by epchē in our own words, and checked against independent sources on 29 October 2026. The sources are listed below.

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