Article about Daniel Dennett

Students in my classes are regularly subjected to Daniel Dennett’s views of consciousness and evolution. Here is a very recent and interesting article in The New Yorker about him. It sort of glows like a hagiography, but the man is undeniably interesting. An excerpt:

On a sunny morning this past December, fresh snow surrounded the house; where the lawn met the water, a Hobie sailboat lay awaiting spring. Dennett entered the sunlit kitchen and, using a special, broad-tined fork, carefully split an English muffin. After eating it with jam, he entered his study, a circular room on the ground floor decorated with sailboat keels of different shapes. A close friend and Little Deer Isle visitor, the philosopher and psychologist Nicholas Humphrey, had e-mailed a draft of an article for Dennett to review. The two men are similar—Humphrey helped discover blindsight, studied apes with Dian Fossey, and was, for a year, the editor of Granta—but they differ on certain points in the philosophy of consciousness. “Until I met Dan,” Humphrey told me, “I never had a philosophical hero. Then I discovered that not only was he a better philosopher than me; he was a better singer, a better dancer, a better tennis player, a better pianist. There is nothing he does not do.”

LPCS Student Symposium: deadline this Friday

The Department of Languages, Philosophy, and communication Studies hosts a student symposium each spring. This year the symposium will be the afternoon of April 21st. The idea is to provide a forum for students to present their ideas and research to a broader audience. You might want to present an idea on your own, or with a group in the form of a panel discussion, or with a group in the form of a roundtable discussion. Each kind of presentation (solo, panel, roundtable) should be conceived as taking 20 minutes or so. If you or a group of you is interested, you should send a 200-word abstract (just a short description of what you’re doing, along with a title) to christa.jones (at) usu.edu. The deadline for abstracts is this Friday, March 17th.