Daniel Dennett is Co-Director of the Center for Cognitive Studies at Tufts University, and Austin B. Fletcher Professor of Philosophy. He is the author of a number of books including Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, Freedom Evolves, and Breaking the Spell. His most recent book, From Bacteria to Bach and Back: The Evolution of Minds was published in 2017. He is also the author of over four hundred scholarly articles on various aspects on the mind, published in journals ranging from Artificial Intelligence and Behavioral and Brain Sciences to Poetics Today and The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism.
In 2012, Dan was awarded the Erasmus Prize in Amsterdam, the highest award given in the Netherlands. He lives with his wife in North Andover, Massachusetts, and has a daughter, a son, and five grandchildren. He received a bachelor of arts degree in philosophy from Harvard. He then went to Oxford to work with Gilbert Ryle, under whose supervision he completed his D.Phil. in philosophy. He taught at U.C. Irvine from 1965 to 1971, when he moved to Tufts, where he has taught ever since, aside from periods visiting at Harvard, Pittsburgh, Oxford, the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, the London School of Economics, and the American University of Beirut.
Dan has received two Guggenheim Fellowships, a Fulbright Fellowship, and a Fellowship at the Center for Advanced Studies in Behavioral Science. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He was the Co-Founder and Co-Director of the Curricular Software Studio at Tufts, and has helped to design museum exhibits on computers for the Smithsonian Institution, the Museum of Science in Boston, and the Computer Museum in Boston. After more than forty summers hobby farming in Maine, he sold his farm in Blue Hill and moved to a house on an island in Maine, where he hopes to continue his sailing and maybe resume his sculpting.
