"Answering the Hard Question by Composing the Inner Witness"

Following the success of Sir David Attenborough’s inaugural Lecture and Professor Frans de Waal, we are delighted to confirm that this year’s ‘Special Lecture’ will be delivered by Professor Daniel Dennett.

Daniel is an American philosopher, writer, and cognitive scientist whose research centers on the philosophy of mind, philosophy of science, and philosophy of biology, particularly as those fields relate to evolutionary biology and cognitive science. Since publishing his landmark thesis Content and Consciousness in 1969, he has been a key voice connecting empirical and theoretical work in neuroscience and artificial intelligence to a materialist philosophy of mind. Daniel argues that while libertarian free will is an illusion we have some "elbow room" in our experience of freedom. His most recent book is Bacteria to Bach and Back, a continuation of his physical conception of consciousness imaged through an evolutionary lens.