I've Been Thinking

"Dennett is the mild-mannered super wizard of philosophical brainstorms."
— 3:AM Magazine

"There seems to be no stopping Daniel Dennett. In academic circles, he has long been recognized as a leading figure. He has played a major role in integrating philosophy of mind with cognitive science, and his ideas have been widely discussed for decades…It is no accident that [he] has gained such a wide readership. He is always fun to read. He has few equals at explaining complex topics, and his positive theories are never boring."
— David Papineau, Times Literary Supplement

"If you have not encountered [Daniel Dennett’s] work, you surely should…Very few contemporary thinkers have supplied us with so many ‘thinking tools.’…Dennett’s book is astonishingly rich and will introduce you to most of the key ideas in the terrain he strides energetically across."
— Adam Zeman, Standpoint

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? Dennett’s answers have profoundly shaped our age of philosophical thought. In I’ve Been Thinking, he reflects on his amazing career and lifelong scientific fascinations.

Dennett’s 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, I’ve Been Thinking provides a master class in the dominant themes of twentieth-century philosophy and cognitive science—including language, evolution, logic, religion, and AI—and reveals both the mistakes and breakthroughs that shaped Dennett’s theories.

Key to this journey are Dennett’s interlocutors—Douglas 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 more—whose 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, I’ve 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 I’m 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.