axlryder said:
Googling Dennett, all I'm seeing is a bunch of videos on atheism. Could you elucidate what other "philosophical" contributions he's made outside of his criticisms of religion? More specifically, what is it that he's said/done which resonates with you personally outside of religious denouncement/criticism?
Well, he's best known for two books, Darwin's Dangerous Idea and Consciousness Explained, which are both excellent. In terms of pure philosophy, my favourite work of his is Freedom Evolves, which is an in-depth look at the question of free will and determinism and whether the two can be reconciled (which he believes they can, and argues it very convincingly)
Many of my friends at university were philosophy students and they were all irritating. You could never have a proper conversation with them because they would pick you up on the smallest logical error. What I like about Dennett is that he never seems to be playing that game. He's great at puncturing preconceived notions of philosophers (particularly the idea of 'philosophical zombies' - things that act just like people but have no conscious experience) but mostly he just makes interesting points clearly, concisely and often wittily.
His most important contribution to philosophy in my opinion is the concept of the various 'stances' you can take towards other things in the universe - as a way of avoiding the question of what something actually is; rather similar to Aristotle's classification of causes. So when faced with an object, you can face it with the physical stance: you can just treat it as a set of atoms obeying physical laws. You can always do this, but it doesn't have much explanatory power. You can also take the design stance - that's when you imagine that the object is 'for' something, and try to explain its properties in that way. Finally, you can take the intentional stance, which is to imagine that the object 'wants' something - it has beliefs and desires. If taking the intentional stance has some predictive power, he argues, then it is useful, whether or not it is actually true.
That's it in a nutshell, anyway. I hugely recommend him. I first encountered his work through the book he co-authored with Douglas Hofstadter, my all-time scientific hero, and I've never read anything by him I didn't like. Even Breaking The Spell, his book on religion, is interesting and an original take on the subject - he dares to ask the question of whether religion might be a good or bad thing independent of its truth.
