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Articles

Daniel C. Dennett: Autobiography (Part 3)

Dan Dennett continues to philosophically reflect on his philosophical life. This third and final episode covers 2003 to the present.

The forces pulling me away from my original philosophical preoccupations have intensified since 2003. I intend to respond to the demands of philosophers that I spell out my positions with more attention to their objections and challenges, but there are only twenty-four hours in the day, and in recent years I have found other projects more pressing. I still identify myself as a philosopher, but a swift skim of my curriculum vitae shows few recent publications in philosophy journals, and those are responses to critics. More and more of my time and energy has been devoted to cognitive science, and to evolutionary theory and its ramifications. I applaud the convergence by naturalistic philosophers, psychologists and other researchers in the life sciences on the physical and biological foundations of the phenomena which compose the humanities: ethics, art and music, humor, and of course religion, to name a few.

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