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Articles

Daniel Dennett: Autobiography (Part 2)

Daniel C. Dennett reflects on his philosophical life, in this episode from the time he received his first academic post, at the University of California, up to 2003.

University of California Irvine was the perfect setting for me to learn a little philosophy. After all, aside from my undergraduate courses, I had had no serious training in philosophy. (In this regard, if in no other, I am like Quine, who got his PhD in philosophy at Harvard, nominally under Whitehead but in fact, as he once told me, almost entirely self-taught. He began his teaching career after having taken hardly any philosophy courses.) I had never even been a teaching assistant, and now I was going to be an assistant professor, designing and teaching all my own courses, and having teaching assistants of my own – a prospect that both thrilled me and filled me with dread.

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