I've Been Thinking

“How unfair for one man to be blessed with such a torrent of stimulating thoughts. Stimulating is an understatement.” —Richard Dawkins, author of The Selfish Gene and The God Delusion

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.