Daniel Dennett
1942-2024 · Analytic Metaphysics · Prominent
Dennett was an American analytic philosopher and an outspoken atheist who held that nothing exists beyond nature: the mind is what the brain does, and God is one more thing people invented. There is no little screening room in your head where consciousness sits and watches, no Cartesian theatre. The brain drafts and revises. Free will is real and survives determinism, and natural selection eats through old ideas like acid.
Signature
The position Dennett is most identified with in the Profiler:
- Mind
- strongly leans Brain Only
- Ethics Basis
- Utilitarian Calculation
Positions on the 13 axes the sources answer
- Natural Processes
- strongly leans Mechanistic (10 on a 0–100 scale from Mechanistic to Purposeful)
- Society
- mildly leans Individualism (69 on a 0–100 scale from Collectivism to Individualism)
- Mind
- strongly leans Brain Only (3 on a 0–100 scale from Brain Only to Beyond Brain)
- Universals
- leans Nominalism (75 on a 0–100 scale from Realism to Nominalism)
- Identity
- leans Changing (75 on a 0–100 scale from Unchanging to Changing)
- Meaning
- strongly leans Constructed (0 on a 0–100 scale from Constructed to Inherent)
- Order
- leans Horizontal (75 on a 0–100 scale from Vertical to Horizontal)
- Nature of Reality
- leans Multiplicity (75 on a 0–100 scale from Unity to Multiplicity)
- Truth
- leans Objective (75 on a 0–100 scale from Subjective to Objective)
- Nature
- leans Mastery (25 on a 0–100 scale from Mastery to Harmony)
- Ethics
- mildly between Ends and Means (44 on a 0–100 scale from Ends to Means)
- Ignorance
- leans Bondage (19 on a 0–100 scale from Bondage to Bliss)
- Conviction
- leans Uncertain (28 on a 0–100 scale from Uncertain to Certain)
7 of 20 axes are left blank: the sources do not answer them, or Dennett refused the framing. Nothing is imputed; a blank is not a middling score.
Foundational questions
- Theology
- Atheism
What is your position on the existence and nature of God or gods? - Highest Good
- Knowledge
What is the highest good? - Good and Evil
- Natural Emergence
What is the fundamental nature of good and evil? - End of Things
- Annihilation
What is the ultimate end of all things? - Perception
- Predictive Perception
What do we directly perceive? - Knowledge
- Naturalism / Pragmatic Test
What is the ultimate foundation of knowledge? - Ethics Basis
- Utilitarian Calculation
What is the ultimate basis of ethics? - Agency
- Compatibilism
What is the nature of human agency and freedom? - Time
- Block Universe
What is the fundamental shape of time? - Language
- Representation
What is the fundamental nature of language? - Death
- Annihilation
What happens at death? - Role of Emotion
- Adaptive Function
What is the proper role of emotion? - Human Nature
- Evolved Animal
What is human nature?