“Philosophers' Syndrome: mistaking a failure of the imagination for an insight into necessity.”
Author detail
Daniel Clement Dennett III was an American philosopher, writer, and cognitive scientist whose research centered on the philosophy of mind, philosophy of science, and philosophy of biology, particularly as those fields relate to evolutionary biology and cognitive science. Dennett was the co-director of the Center for Cognitive Studies and the Austin B. Fletcher Professor of Philosophy at Tufts University in Massachusetts. Dennett was a vocal atheist and secularist, a member of the Secular Coalition for America advisory board, and a member of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry, as well as an outspoken supporter of the Brights movement. Dennett was referred to as one of the "Four Horsemen of New Atheism", along with Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and the late Christopher Hitchens. In 1962, Dennett married Susan Bell. They lived in North Andover, Massachusetts, and had a daughter, a son, and six grandchildren. He was an avid sailor. Dennett died of interstitial lung disease at Maine Medical Center on April 19, 2024, at the age of 82. [source: Wikipedia]
Quotes
Showing 1-11 of 11
“Philosophers' Syndrome: mistaking a failure of the imagination for an insight into necessity.”
“Problems in science are sometimes made easier by adding complications.”
“Imagination is cheap as long as you don't have to worry about the details.”
“The secret of happiness: Find something more important than you are and dedicate your life to it.”
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“My faith in the expertise of physicists like Richard Feynman, for instance, permits me to endorse—and, if it comes to it, bet heavily on the truth of—a proposition that I don't understand. S...”
“If you can approach the world's complexities, both its glories and its horrors, with an attitude of humble curiosity, acknowledging that however deeply you have seen, you have only scratched...”
“That's a rhetorical question, and trying to answer rhetorical questions instead of being cowed by them is a good habit to cultivate.”
“But recently I have learned from discussions with a variety of scientists and other non-philosophers (e.g., the scientists participating with me in the Sean Carroll workshop on the future of...”
“Not a single one of the cells that compose you knows who you are, or cares.”
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“To put it bluntly but fairly, anyone today who doubts that the variety of life on this planet was produced by a process of evolution is simply ignorant—inexcusably ignorant, in a world where...”
“People are afraid of being more ignorant than their children―especially, apparantly, their daughters.”