Daniel Dennett Presents the 4 Biggest Ideas in Philosophy in One of His Final Videos (RIP)

A week ago, Big Think released this video fea­tur­ing philoso­pher Daniel Den­nett talk­ing about the four biggest ideas in phi­los­o­phy. Today, we learned that he passed away at age 82. The New York Times obit­u­ary for Den­nett reads: “Espous­ing his ideas in best sell­ers, he insist­ed that reli­gion was an illu­sion, free will was a fan­ta­sy and evo­lu­tion could only be explained by nat­ur­al selec­tion.” “Mr. Den­nett com­bined a wide range of knowl­edge with an easy, often play­ful writ­ing style to reach a lay pub­lic, avoid­ing the impen­e­tra­ble con­cepts and turgid prose of many oth­er con­tem­po­rary philoso­phers. Beyond his more than 20 books and scores of essays, his writ­ings even made their way into the the­ater and onto the con­cert stage.”

Above, Den­nett, a long-time phi­los­o­phy pro­fes­sor at Tufts Uni­ver­si­ty, out­lines the “four eras he evolved through on his own jour­ney as a philoso­pher: clas­si­cal phi­los­o­phy, evo­lu­tion­ary the­o­ry, memet­ic the­o­ry, and the inten­tion­al stance. Each stage added depth to his per­spec­tive and under­stand­ing… Dennett’s key take­away is a request for philoso­phers to reeval­u­ate their method­olo­gies, urg­ing mod­ern-day thinkers to embrace the insights offered by new sci­en­tif­ic dis­cov­er­ies. By com­bin­ing the exis­ten­tial and the­o­ret­i­cal view­points of philoso­phers with the ana­lyt­i­cal and evi­den­tial per­spec­tive of sci­en­tists, we can begin to ful­ly and accu­rate­ly inter­pret the world around us.”

To help you delve a lit­tle deep­er into Daniel Den­net­t’s world, we’ve also post­ed below a vin­tage TED video where the philoso­pher dis­cuss­es the illu­sion of con­scious­ness. We would also encour­age you to explore the Den­nett items in the Relat­eds below.

Relat­ed Con­tent 

Daniel Den­nett Presents Sev­en Tools For Crit­i­cal Think­ing

How to Argue With Kind­ness and Care: 4 Rules from Philoso­pher Daniel Den­nett

Daniel Den­nett and Cor­nel West Decode the Phi­los­o­phy of The Matrix

Hear What It Sounds Like When Philoso­pher Daniel Dennett’s Brain Activ­i­ty Gets Turned into Music