With the passing of Daniel Dennett, Keith Frankish reflects on his life and the power of his thought. Daniel Dennett was one of the greatest philosophers of our age, his clarity of thinking brought new light to the philosophy of evolution, consciousness, free will and metaphysics. The IAI will be releasing several reflections on Daniel Dennett, his loss will be felt at HowTheLightGetsIn Hay, where we will be honouring his memory and debating the philosophy of evolutionary psychology.

The American philosopher Wilfrid Sellars said that the aim of philosophy is ‘to understand how things in the broadest possible sense of the term hang together in the broadest possible sense of the term’. No contemporary philosopher pursued that aim more energetically and successfully than Daniel Dennett.

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Dan didn’t ask us to deny their reality, only to give up naïve essentialist views of them

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Dan didn’t see philosophy as a specialism remote from everyday life or distinct from the work of scientists. He saw it as an attempt to see how science and everyday reality fit together — how a world of subatomic particles obeying strict physical laws could at the same time be a world of free, conscious agents, with thoughts, hopes and dreams. Some said he was an eliminativist, who denied the reality of belief, consciousness, and free will, but he wasn’t. He would say that of course thoughts, experiences and choices are real — as real as threats and opportunities and dances and jokes and cuteness and love and all the other things that populate our everyday ontology — our manifest image. They are real patterns in the blooming buzzing confusion of the world, which we have learned to identify and value. Dan didn’t ask us to deny their reality, only to give up naïve essentialist views of them and replace them with better, more flexible ones, which permit a deeper engagement with the world and its value. He took broken concepts and mended them.