Audiobooks by Daniel C. Dennett

Brought to you by Penguin. 'Who would have guessed that a philosopher's life could be so full of adventures?' Daniel C. Dennett, philosopher and cognitive scientist, has spent his career considering consciousness. 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 encounters and debates with a host of legendary thinkers, and reveals the breakthroughs and misjudgments that shaped his paradigm-shifting philosophies. Thinking, Dennett argues, is hard, and risky. In fact, all good philosophical thinking is inevitably accompanied by bafflement, frustration and self-doubt. It is only in getting it wrong that we, very occasionally, find a way to get it right. This memoir by one of the greatest philosophers of our time will speak to anyone who seeks a life of the mind with adventure and creativity. ©2023 Daniel C. Dennett (P)2023 Penguin Audio

Daniel C. Dennett (Author), Graham Winton (Narrator)

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De las bacterias a Bach (From Bacteria to Bach and Back): La evolucion de la mente (The Evolution of

¿Por qué hay mentes? ¿Y cómo han llegado a aparecer? En la que con toda seguridad se trata de una de las obras más importantes sobre la evolución de la mente que se haya escrito recientemente, Daniel Dennett intenta responder a estas dos preguntas. Por el camino el autor analizará qué nos asemeja y qué nos distancia del resto de habitantes de nuestro planeta, qué tipo de diseño ha seguido la naturaleza para construir una herramienta tan poderosa y compleja, y qué mecanismos nos permiten reflexionar sobre nuestras propias mentes. Todo ello armado con la habitual vis crítica, analítica y no exenta de humor que caracterizan al que sin duda es uno de los pensadores más importantes y peculiares de nuestro tiempo, que con este libro ha creado su obra más accesible y la que resume su larga trayectoria como investigador y pensador.

Daniel C. Dennett (Author), Sergio Alberto Bustos De La Tijera (Narrator)

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Kinds of Minds: Toward an Understanding of Consciousness

Combining ideas from philosophy, artificial intelligence, and neurobiology, Daniel Dennett leads the reader on a fascinating journey of inquiry, exploring such intriguing possibilities as: Can any of us really know what is going on in someone else's mind? What distinguishes the human mind from the minds of animals, especially those capable of complex behavior? If such animals, for instance, were magically given the power of language, would their communities evolve an intelligence as subtly discriminating as ours? Will robots, once they have been endowed with sensory systems like those that provide us with experience, ever exhibit the particular traits long thought to distinguish the human mind, including the ability to think about thinking? Dennett addresses these questions from an evolutionary perspective. Beginning with the macromolecules of DNA and RNA, the author shows how, step-by-step, animal life moved from the simple ability to respond to frequently recurring environmental conditions to much more powerful ways of beating the odds, ways of using patterns of past experience to predict the future in never-before-encountered situations. Whether talking about robots whose video-camera 'eyes' give us the powerful illusion that 'there is somebody in there' or asking us to consider whether spiders are just tiny robots mindlessly spinning their webs of elegant design, Dennett is a master at finding and posing questions sure to stimulate and even disturb.

Daniel C. Dennett (Author), Daniel Henning (Narrator)

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The Four Horsemen: The Discussion that Sparked an Atheist Revolution Foreword by Stephen Fry

Random House presents the audiobook edition of The Four Horsemen, written and read by Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Daniel C. Dennett and Christopher Hitchens. With a foreword written and read by Stephen Fry. Known as the 'four horsemen' of New Atheism, these four big thinkers of the twenty-first century met only once. Their electrifying examination of ideas on this remarkable occasion was intense and wide-ranging. Everything that was said as they agreed and disagreed with one another, interrogated ideas and exchanged insights - about religion and atheism, science and sense - speaks with urgency to our present age. Questions they asked of each other included: 'Is it ever possible to win a war of ideas? Is spirituality the preserve of the religious? Are there any truths you would rather not know? Would you want to see the end of faith?' The dialogue was recorded, and is now transcribed and presented here with new introductions from the surviving three horsemen. With a sparkling introduction from Stephen Fry, it makes essential reading for all their admirers and for anyone interested in exploring the tensions between faith and reason.

Christopher Hitchens, Daniel C. Dennett, Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris (Author), Christopher Hitchens, Daniel C. Dennett, Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Stephen Fry (Narrator)

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From Bacteria to Bach and Back: The Evolution of Minds

What is human consciousness and how is it possible? This question fascinates thinking people from poets and painters to physicists, psychologists, and philosophers. From Bacteria to Bach and Back is Daniel C. Dennett's brilliant answer, extending perspectives from his earlier work in surprising directions, exploring the deep interactions of evolution, brains, and human culture. Part philosophical whodunit, part bold scientific conjecture, this landmark work enlarges themes that have sustained Dennett's legendary career at the forefront of philosophical thought. In his inimitable style?laced with wit and arresting thought experiments?Dennett shows how culture enables reflection by installing a bounty of thinking tools, or memes, in our brains. Language, itself composed of memes, turbocharged this interplay. The result, a mind that can comprehend the questions it poses, emerges from a process of cultural evolution. An agenda-setting book for a new generation of philosophers and other researchers, From Bacteria to Bach and Back will delight and entertain anyone who hopes to understand human creativity in all its wondrous applications.

Daniel C. Dennett (Author), Tom Perkins (Narrator)

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Elbow Room: The Varieties of Free Will Worth Wanting

In this landmark 1984 work on free will, Daniel Dennett makes a case for compatibilism. His aim, as he writes in the preface to this new edition, was a cleanup job, "saving everything that mattered about the everyday concept of free will, while jettisoning the impediments." In Elbow Room, Dennett argues that the varieties of free will worth wanting -- those that underwrite moral and artistic responsibility -- are not threatened by advances in science but distinguished, explained, and justified in detail. Dennett tackles the question of free will in a highly original and witty manner, drawing on the theories and concepts of fields that range from physics and evolutionary biology to engineering, automata theory, and artificial intelligence. He shows how the classical formulations of the problem in philosophy depend on misuses of imagination, and he disentangles the philosophical problems of real interest from the "family of anxieties" in which they are often enmeshed -- imaginary agents and bogeymen, including the Peremptory Puppeteer, the Nefarious Neurosurgeon, and the Cosmic Child Whose Dolls We Are. Putting sociobiology in its rightful place, he concludes that we can have free will and science too. He explores reason, control and self-control, the meaning of "can" and "could have done otherwise," responsibility and punishment, and why we would want free will in the first place. A fresh reading of Dennett's book shows how much it can still contribute to current discussions of free will. This edition includes as its afterword Dennett's 2012 Erasmus Prize essay.

Daniel C. Dennett (Author), Don Hagen (Narrator)

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Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking

Over a storied career, philosopher Daniel C. Dennett has engaged questions about science and the workings of the mind. His answers have combined rigorous argument with strong empirical grounding. And a lot of fun. In this audiobook, Dennett shares the "imagination extenders and focus-holders" that he and others have developed for addressing life's most fundamental questions. Along with novel discussions of familiar moves - Occam's Razor, reductio ad absurdum - Dennett offers cognitive tools purpose-built for the most treacherous subject matter: evolution, meaning, mind, and free will. From skyhooks to deepities, the Wandering Two-Bitser and the Prime Mammal, Dennett's genial style persuades as it educates, pointing out pitfalls in arguments as it challenges listeners to find others. The result is a sweeping work of deep intellectual seriousness that's also studded with impish delights. Intuition Pumps offers intrepid thinkers - in all walks of life - delicious opportunities to explore their pet ideas with new powers.

Daniel C. Dennett (Author), Jeff Crawford (Narrator)

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