Within philosophy familiar names include Daniel Dennett who writes from a computational systems perspective, John Searle known for his controversial Chinese room, Jerry Fodor who advocates functionalism, and Douglas Hofstadter, famous for writing Gödel, Escher, Bach, which questions the nature of words and thought.

Daniel Dennett has argued for an approach he calls heterophenomenology, which means treating verbal reports as stories that may or may not be true, but his ideas about how to do this have not been widely adopted.

Dennett is a firm atheist and secularist, a member of the Secular Coalition for America advisory board, as well as an outspoken supporter of the Brights movement.

As of January 2012, Dennett is the Austin B. Fletcher Professor of Philosophy, University Professor, and Co-Director of the Center for Cognitive Studies ( with Ray Jackendoff ) at Tufts University.

While he is a confirmed compatibilist on free will, in " On Giving Libertarians What They Say They Want " – Chapter 15 of his 1978 book Brainstorms, Dennett articulated the case for a two-stage model of decision making in contrast to libertarian views.

While other philosophers have developed two-stage models, including William James, Henri Poincaré, Arthur Holly Compton, and Henry Margenau, Dennett defends this model for the following reasons:

In his 2006 book, Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon, Dennett attempts to subject religious belief to the same treatment, explaining possible evolutionary reasons for the phenomenon of religious adherence.

In Darwin's Dangerous Idea, Dennett writes that evolution can account for the origin of morality.

* The Moscow Center for Consciousness Studies video interview with Daniel Dennett 2010-03-05 ( with transcript )

* 1907 – George Dennett, aided by Gilbert Jessop, dismisses Northamptonshire for 12 runs, the lowest total in first-class cricket.

Daniel Dennett countered that for some things, such as money, baseball, or consciousness, one cannot have the thing without also having the concept of the thing.

) In 1999, Susan Blackmore, a psychologist at the University of the West of England, published The Meme Machine, which more fully worked out the ideas of Dennett, Lynch, and Brodie and attempted to compare and contrast them with various approaches from the cultural evolutionary mainstream, as well as providing novel, and controversial, memetic-based theories for the evolution of language and the human sense of individual selfhood.

Plympton operates the Dennett Elementary School for students from kindergarten through sixth grade.

Daniel Dennett, for example, calls Twin Earth and other experiments like it " intuition pumps ", which play on a strong but ultimately illusory intuition.

Daniel Dennett and others also provide arguments against this notion, see Mary's room for details.

In this book Daniel Dennett explored what it means for people to have free will.

Since Dennett wrote Elbow Room ( 1984 ) there has been an on-going attempt by some scientists to answer this question by suggesting that the brain is a device for controlling quantum indeterminacy so as to construct behavioral choice.

According to Dennett, belief in free will is a necessary condition for having free will.

As Dennett says, " Skinner proclaimed that one simple iteration of the fundamental Darwinian process — operant conditioning — could account for all mentality, all learning, not just in pigeons but in human beings.

Some writers in the philosophy of mind, most notably Daniel Dennett, have cited the behavior of this animal for their arguments about human and animal free will.

The Comstock laws banned distribution of sex education information, based on the premise that it was obscene and led to promiscuous behavior Mary Ware Dennett was fined $ 300 in 1928, for distributing a pamphlet containing sex education material.

The emergentist multiple drafts principle proposed by Daniel Dennett in Consciousness Explained may be useful for prediction: it involves the evaluation and selection of the most appropriate " draft " to fit the current environment.

" Daniel Dennett, in his book Breaking the Spell, suggests that if non-naturalists are concerned with this connotation of the word bright, then they should invent an equally positive sounding word for themselves, like supers ( i. e., one whose worldview contains supernaturalism ).

For example, Daniel Dennett and Douglas Hofstadter argue that anything capable of passing the Turing test is necessarily conscious, while David Chalmers argues that a philosophical zombie could pass the test, yet fail to be conscious.

Dennett gives the example of playing a computer at chess.

A canonical example of greedy reductionism, labelled as such by Dennett himself, is the ( radical ) behaviorism of B. F. Skinner.

Douglas Hofstadter and Daniel Dennett have used this mechanistic behavior as an example of how seemingly thoughtful behavior can actually be quite mindless, the opposite of free will ( or, as Hofstadter described it, sphexishness ).

For example, the Romans believed in the embodiment of luck as the goddess Fortuna, while the philosopher Daniel Dennett believes that " luck is mere luck " rather than a property of a person or thing.

For example, philosopher Daniel Dennett has proposed that humans are genetically predisposed to have a theory of mind because there has been evolutionary selection for the human ability to adopt the intentional stance.

In Freedom Evolves, Daniel Dennett argues that a no-free-will conclusion is based on dubious assumptions about the location of consciousness, as well as questioning the accuracy and interpretation of Libet's results.

This argument has been expressed by Daniel Dennett who argues that, " when philosophers claim that zombies are conceivable, they invariably underestimate the task of conception ( or imagination ), and end up imagining something that violates their own definition ".

Dennett argues that Gould alternated between revolutionary and conservative claims about the theory, and that each time Gould made a revolutionary statement — or appeared to do so — he was criticized, and thus retreated to a traditional neo-Darwinian position.

However, John Searle argues that Dennett, who insists that discussing subjectivity is nonsense because it is unscientific and science presupposes objectivity, is making a category error.

Dennett argues that such efforts to salvage free will by finding a way out of the prison of determinism are wasted.

Dennett argues that choice exists in a general sense: that because we base our decisions on context, we limit our options as the situation becomes more specific.

Daniel Dennett also argues that no clear conclusion about volition can be derived from Benjamin Libet's experiments supposedly demonstrating the non-existence of conscious volition.

In turn, Daniel Dennett argues in Darwin's Dangerous Idea that this represents a " universal acid " that may be applied to a number of seemingly disparate areas of philosophical inquiry ( consciousness and free will in particular ).

Objection: Daniel Dennett argues that Mary would not, in fact, learn something new if she stepped out of her black and white room to see the colour red.

Dennett argues that functional knowledge is identical to the experience, with no ineffable ' qualia ' left over.

Dennett argues that " when philosophers claim that zombies are conceivable, they invariably underestimate the task of conception ( or imagination ), and end up imagining something that violates their own definition ".

Dennett argues that there is no principled basis for picking one of these theories over the other, because they share a common error in supposing that there is a special time and place where unconscious processing becomes consciously experienced, entering into what Dennett calls the " Cartesian theatre ".

Dennett argues that it is best to understand human behavior at the level of the intentional stance, without making any specific commitments to any deeper reality to the artifacts of folk psychology.

Daniel Dennett argues that no clear conclusion about volition can be derived from Libet's experiment because of ambiguities in the timings of the different events involved.