The American Daniel C. Dennett, one of the most read and discussed philosophers in his country, died this Friday in Portland (Maine) at the age of 82 due to complications from a lung disease, as confirmed by his wife, Susan Bell Dennett, to the press. .
His extensive career leaves behind more than 20 books, some of them bestsellers such as Types of mind: towards an understanding of consciousness (Debate, 2000), in which he focused on various areas such as consciousness, free will, religion and evolutionary biology.
“There is no science without philosophy, there is only science whose philosophical baggage is accepted without discussion,” defended Dennett in the book Darwin’s dangerous idea: evolution and the meaning of life (Galaxia Gutenberg, 2000), which cost him heated confrontations with other thinkers.
Dennett tried to explain brain development in terms of the evolution of humans from other forms of animal life throughout the 1990s. In 1991 he already expressed that consciousness could only be understood by understanding the physiology of the brain, which he saw as a kind of “supercomputer.”
Later, religion would be one of his great fields of study. The author, an openly atheist, published research with his colleague Linda LaScola, titled Caught in the Pulpit: Leaving Belief Behind (Trapped in the Pulpit: Leaving Belief Behind, 2013), in which he interviewed dozens of clerics who revealed their skepticism, but considered that their work provided comfort to the faithful.
With his recent publication, a memoir titled I’ve Been Thinking (I’ve been thinking), he wanted to record that what is truly exciting “is the magic of life as evolution, the magic of our brain evolving between our ears,” as he confessed at the end of 2023 to The New York Times. Therefore, “miracles are not needed, just understanding the world as it truly is.”
The son of a historian and diplomat and a professor dedicated to publishing, Dennett seemed destined from the beginning for the academic world. He graduated in Philosophy from Harvard University, and received his doctorate from Oxford with a groundbreaking thesis, Content and awareness (Gedisa, 1996), a work with several revised editions, translated into numerous languages. His curiosity also led him, from a very young age, to try countless activities. He practiced drawing, sculpture, was a jazz pianist, skilled navigator, computer engineer and successful lecturer. Married and father of two adopted children who gave him five grandchildren, he managed a farm in the State of Maine with his wife for many years.
His works even had musical adaptations. It is the case of Mind Out of Matter (2014), which involved the ingenious American composer Scott Johnson, known for combining melodies with speeches of different cadences and timbres.