Viking Press (2003)
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Abstract |
Daniel C. Dennett is a brilliant polemicist, famous for challenging unexamined orthodoxies. Over the last thirty years, he has played a major role in expanding our understanding of consciousness, developmental psychology, and evolutionary theory. And with such groundbreaking, critically acclaimed books as Consciousness Explained and Darwin's Dangerous Idea (a National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize finalist), he has reached a huge general and professional audience. In this new book, Dennett shows that evolution is the key to resolving the ancient problems of moral and political freedom. Like the planet's atmosphere on which life depends, the conditions on which our freedom depends had to evolve, and like the atmosphere, they continue to evolve-and could be extinguished. According to Dennett, biology provides the perspective from which we can distinguish the varieties of freedom that matter. Throughout the history of life on this planet, an interacting web and internal and external conditions have provided the frameworks for the design of agents that are more free than their parts-from the unwitting gropings of the simplest life forms to the more informed activities of animals to the moral dilemmas that confront human beings living in societies. As in his previous books, Dennett weaves a richly detailed narrative enlivened by analogies as entertaining as they are challenging. Here is the story of how we came to be different from all other creatures, how our early ancestors mindlessly created human culture, and then, how culture gave us our minds, our visions, our moral problems-in a nutshell, our freedom.
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Keywords | Free will and determinism Decision making |
Categories | (categorize this paper) |
Reprint years | 2004 |
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Call number | BJ1461.D427 2003 |
ISBN(s) | 0670031860 0140283897 0142003840 |
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Nonreductive Physicalism and the Limits of the Exclusion Principle.Christian List & Peter Menzies - 2009 - Journal of Philosophy 106 (9):475-502.
Artificial Intelligence, Values, and Alignment.Iason Gabriel - 2020 - Minds and Machines 30 (3):411-437.
Skepticism About Moral Responsibility.Gregg D. Caruso - 2018 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2018):1-81.
Patiency is Not a Virtue: The Design of Intelligent Systems and Systems of Ethics.Joanna J. Bryson - 2018 - Ethics and Information Technology 20 (1):15-26.
Who’s Responsible for This? Moral Responsibility, Externalism, and Knowledge about Implicit Bias.Natalia Washington & Daniel Kelly - 2016 - In Jennifer Saul & Michael Brownstein (eds.), Implicit Bias and Philosophy, Volume 2: Moral Responsibility, Structural Injustice, and Ethics. Oxford University Press UK.
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