---
title: "Remembering Daniel Dennett"
date: "2024-05-08T06:00:00+01:00"
modified: "2024-05-08T06:00:00+01:00"
url: "https://newhumanist.org.uk/2024/05/08/remembering-daniel-dennett/"
post_id: 7557
categories: ["Uncategorised"]
---

# Remembering Daniel Dennett

 ![Daniel Dennett](https://newhumanist.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/images/1024px-Daniel_dennett_Oct2008.jpg "Credit: Mathias Schindler/Creative Commons")Credit: Mathias Schindler/Creative CommonsHumanism lost a titan of the movement in April when the American philosopher Daniel Dennett died at the age of 82. One of the so-called “Four Horsemen of New Atheism”, along with Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris, he was a prominent advocate of secularism and melded philosophy and science in his work on consciousness and cognition.

Dennett’s evolutionary take on religion, which he described as a “meme” that replicates and evolves as it passes between people and generations, like a parasite or a virus, proved influential in his field. He contributed to *New Humanist* on several occasions, including [a 2007 article on “faith” in science](/articles/435/to-tell-the-truth).

Dennett was not without his detractors. As our former editor Caspar Melville wrote [when he met him back in 2013](/articles/4203/thinking-machine-an-interview-with-daniel-dennett), his debates could feel “more like a bare-knuckle street fight than a regulation bout”. But Melville concluded, as so many did, that “my encounter with Dennett … sharpened my thinking”. As a 21-year-old, the young Dennett defined his project as “figuring out as a philosopher how brains could be, or support, or explain, or cause, minds.” He not only made an indelible contribution to this project, but also proved a formidable figure in the secular and rationalist movements. He will be sorely missed.

[*This article is a preview from New Humanist’s summer 2024 issue. Subscribe now.*](/subscribe)