I''ve Been Thinking

Daniel C. Dennett, preeminent philosopher and cognitive scientist, has spent his career considering the thorniest, most fundamental mysteries of the mind. Do we have free will? What is consciousness and how did it come about? What distinguishes human minds from the minds of animals? Dennetts answers have profoundly shaped our age of philosophical thought. In Ive Been Thinking, he reflects on his amazing career and lifelong scientific fascinations.

Dennetts relentless curiosity has taken him from a childhood in Beirut and the classrooms of Harvard, Oxford, and Tufts, to Cognitive Cruises on sailboats and the fields and orchards of Maine, and to laboratories and think tanks around the world. Along the way, Ive Been Thinking provides a master class in the dominant themes of twentieth-century philosophy and cognitive scienceincluding language, evolution, logic, religion, and AIand reveals both the mistakes and breakthroughs that shaped Dennetts theories.

Key to this journey are Dennetts interlocutorsDouglas Hofstadter, Marvin Minsky, Willard Van Orman Quine, Gilbert Ryle, Richard Rorty, Thomas Nagel, John Searle, Gerald Edelman, Stephen Jay Gould, Jerry Fodor, Rodney Brooks, and morewhose ideas, even when he disagreed with them, helped to form his convictions about the mind and consciousness. Studded with photographs and told with characteristic warmth, Ive Been Thinking also instills the value of life beyond the university, one enriched by sculpture, music, farming, and deep connection to family.

Dennett compels us to consider: What do I really think? And what if Im wrong? This memoir by one of the greatest minds of our time will speak to anyone who seeks to balance a life of the mind with adventure and creativity.