Table of Contents

What Kinds of Minds Are There? * Knowing Your Own Mind * We Mind-Havers, We Minders * Words and Minds * The Problem of Incommunicative Minds Intentionality: The Intentional Systems Approach * Simple Beginnings: The Birth of Agency * Adopting the Intentional Stance * The Misguided Goal of Propositional Precision * Original and Derived Intentionality The Body and Its Minds * From Sensitivity to Sentience? * The Media and the Messages * My Body Has a Mind of Its Own! How Intentionality Came into Focus * The Tower of Generate-and-Test * The Search for Sentience: A Progress Report * From Phototaxis to Metaphysics The Creation of Thinking * Unthinking Natural Psychologists * Making Things to Think With * Talking to Ourselves Our Minds and Other Minds * Our Consciousness, Their Minds * Pain and Suffering: What Matters

About the Author

Daniel C. Dennett is director of the centre for Cognitive Studies at Tufts University and the author of Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life and Consciousness Explained

Reviews

Dennett (Darwin's Dangerous Idea), director of the Center for Cognitive Studies at Tufts University, avers that language is the "slingshot" that has "launched [humans] far beyond all other earthly species in the power to look ahead and reflect." In this brief study, some of which is drawn from notes for the author's various lectures, and which returns him to some of the themes of his controversial bestseller, Consciousness Explained (1991), he explores how the human mind came into existence. Along the way, he investigates such questions as, How does the mind work? Can we know another's mind? Can a woman know what it's like to be a man (and vice versa)? What are nonhuman minds like? Could a robot ever be "conscious"? Philosopher that he is, Dennett continually raises and refines his questions about these and other subjects, attempting to tease us closer to understanding. By the end of the book, he confesses, he has not so much presented answers as found better questions to ask. Though some readers may be put off by Dennett's cocksure tone, others will be rewarded by his witty, intelligible speculation. (July)