Dennett is an American naturalist philosopher specialising in the philosophy of mind. He received a B.A. in philosophy from Harvard University in 1963 and subsequently pursued graduate study at the University of Oxford. Studying under Gilbert Ryle, Dennett became interested in the nature of consciousness and wrote his doctoral thesis on the topic, which he later turned into his first book, Content and Consciousness (1969). He received a D.Phil. in philosophy in 1965, whereupon he returned to the United States to teach at the University of California, Irvine. In 1971 he moved to Tufts University, Massachusetts, where he was appointed University Professor and became director of the university’s Center for Cognitive Studies in 1985. He was appointed Austin B. Fletcher Professor of Philosophy at Tufts in 2000. In addition to his formal philosophical training, Dennett made autodidactic forays into the fields of artificial intelligence, neuroscience, and cognitive psychology. His interdisciplinary strategy became more prevalent among philosophers as scientific researchers gathered more information about the brain’s mechanisms. On the strength of his philosophical contributions to the emerging field of cognitive science, Dennett was appointed director of the Center for Cognitive Studies at Tufts in 1985. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1987. From 1993 Dennett was involved with a team at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology that attempted to construct an intelligent, and perhaps even conscious, robot called Cog. Throughout his career he authored a number of books that detailed his theories of consciousness, such as Consciousness Explained (1991), Darwin’s Dangerous Idea (1995), Kinds of Minds (1996) and Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking (2013). Other philosophical works include Brainchildren: Essays on Designing Minds (1998) and Sweet Dreams: Philosophical Obstacles to a Science of Consciousness (2005), Neuroscience and Philosophy: Brain, Mind, and Language (2007). His 2006 volume Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon advanced evolutionary explanations for the development of religious thought.
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