Daniel C. Dennett--preeminent philosopher and cognitive scientist--has
spent his career creating the basis for a naturalistic account of
consciousness with acumen and elegance. I've Been Thinking traces the
development of Dennett's own intellect and instructs us how we too can
become good thinkers.
Dennett's restless curiosity leads him from his childhood in Beirut to
Harvard, and from Parisian jazz clubs to "tillosophy" on his tractor in
Maine. Along the way, he reveals the breakthroughs and misjudgments that
shaped his paradigm-shifting philosophies. Dennett introduces his
legendary interlocutors--Douglas Hofstadter, Marvin Minsky, Willard Van
Orman Quine, Gilbert Ryle, Richard Rorty, Thomas Nagel, John Searle,
Gerald Edelman, Stephen Jay Gould, Jerry Fodor, and more--whose ideas,
even when he disagreed with them, proved formative to his own
convictions about the mind and consciousness. 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.
