About

About this site

An independent study site on the philosophy of mind, built around one short essay by Daniel Dennett and the long argument it joins. A sister to Philosophy of Time.

By the light of a lamp at the centre of a mechanical model of the solar system, a lecturer and an absorbed audience of adults and children lean in — Joseph Wright of Derby, *A Philosopher Lecturing on the Orrery*, c. 1766. Derby Museum and Art Gallery. A machine that models the heavens, and the faces of people coming to understand it.Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

What it is

The starting point is Dennett's "Illusionism as the Obvious Default Theory of Consciousness" (2016), his reply to Keith Frankish. In a few pages it sets out the strategy behind his whole view of the mind: treat consciousness like stage magic, and explain the trick before believing in real magic. The Dennett page follows that essay and the wider theory behind it. Each major view of the mind then gets a page of its own, setting out the view, the argument for it, and where it meets and parts from Dennett, from his closest allies through two and a half thousand years of history to the thinkers who reject his picture outright.

Who made it

Tim Stephenson standing in front of green, steep-sided mountains under low cloud — **Tim Stephenson.**

I'm Tim Stephenson. I made Philosophy of Time to work through David Deutsch's chapter on time, and this site to do the same for the mind. I am drawn to functionalist views, and the site starts from Dennett for that reason, but every view here is set out as strongly as I can manage. If you think I have got Dennett, or anyone else, wrong, I would like to know.

Sources and copyright

Dennett's essay and the works of other modern authors are in copyright. The site summarises them in its own words and quotes at most one short passage from any copyrighted source on a page.
Where a modern author is set off in a quotation box, the words are our paraphrase, marked "after".
Quotations from Descartes, Leibniz, Aristotle and Galileo are our own translations. Hume, Huxley, William James and Turing are quoted from works now in the public domain.
Book links on the reading page are plain links, not affiliate links.

Images

The images are public-domain artworks and photographs from Wikimedia Commons, resized to 1280 pixels wide. The full list, with a link to each file's Commons page, is below and in art/CREDITS.md.

Image credits
Work	Collection	Source	Used on
Hieronymus Bosch and workshop, The Conjurer, c. 1502	Musée Municipal, Saint-Germain-en-Laye	Commons	Home, Videos
Georges de La Tour, The Cheat with the Ace of Diamonds, c. 1636–38	Musée du Louvre	Commons	Dennett
After William Hogarth, Satire on False Perspective, 1754		Commons	Dennett
Jan Saenredam after Cornelis van Haarlem, Plato's Cave, 1604		Commons	Dennett
Robert Fludd, the eye of the imagination, 1617–19		Commons	Dennett, Glossary
Hans Holbein the Younger, The Ambassadors, 1533	National Gallery, London	Commons	Frankish
The Müller-Lyer figure, after Franz Brentano, 1892		Commons	Frankish
Claude Monet, Impression, Sunrise, 1872	Musée Marmottan Monet	Commons	Humphrey
Georges de La Tour, Magdalene with the Night Light, c. 1640–45	Musée du Louvre	Commons	Graziano
Santiago Ramón y Cajal, drawings of the cerebral cortex, c. 1899		Commons	The Churchlands
Portrait of Aristotle, Roman copy after Lysippos	Palazzo Altemps, Rome; photo Jastrow, public domain	Commons	Aristotle
After Frans Hals, Portrait of René Descartes	Musée du Louvre	Commons	Descartes
Illustration from Descartes' Treatise of Man, 1664		Commons	Descartes, Videos
Jacob van Ruisdael, The Windmill at Wijk bij Duurstede, c. 1670	Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam	Commons	Leibniz, Videos
Allan Ramsay, David Hume, 1766	Scottish National Portrait Gallery	Commons	Hume, Seth (two-tone figure)
Claude Monet, The Saint-Lazare Station, 1877	Musée d'Orsay	Commons	Huxley
Carlo Pellegrini ("Ape"), Thomas Henry Huxley, Vanity Fair, 1871		Commons	Huxley
J. M. W. Turner, High Street, Oxford, 1810	Ashmolean Museum, Oxford	Commons	Ryle
Joseph Friedrich zu Racknitz, the Mechanical Turk, 1789		Commons	Turing, Videos
William N. Jennings, photograph of lightning, 1882		Commons	Place and Smart
Giuseppe Arcimboldo, Vertumnus, 1591	Skokloster Castle	Commons	Putnam, Videos
Ernst Haeckel, Chiroptera, Art Forms in Nature, 1904		Commons	Nagel, Videos
Francisco Goya, The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters, 1799		Commons	Nagel
Antonello da Messina, Saint Jerome in his Study, c. 1475	National Gallery, London	Commons	Searle, Reading
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, colour wheel, 1809	Freies Deutsches Hochstift, Frankfurt	Commons	Jackson
Pieter Bruegel the Elder, The Tower of Babel, 1563	Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna	Commons	Block, Compare
Henry Fuseli, The Nightmare, 1781	Detroit Institute of Arts	Commons	Seth
Dante Gabriel Rossetti, How They Met Themselves, c. 1860–64	Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge	Commons	Chalmers, Videos
Justus Sustermans, Portrait of Galileo Galilei, 1636	Uffizi Galleries, Florence	Commons	Goff
Odilon Redon, The Eye, Like a Strange Balloon, Moves Towards Infinity, 1882	Art Institute of Chicago	Commons	Goff, Videos
Joseph Wright of Derby, An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump, 1768	National Gallery, London	Commons	Lab
Joseph Wright of Derby, A Philosopher Lecturing on the Orrery, c. 1766	Derby Museum and Art Gallery	Commons	About
Willem Swanenburg after Jan Cornelis Woudanus, The University Library at Leiden, 1610		Commons	Popper
Julia Margaret Cameron, Charles Darwin, 1868		Commons	Popper
The Flammarion engraving, from Camille Flammarion's L'atmosphère, 1888		Commons	Deutsch
Portrait of Joseph Marie Jacquard, woven in silk, 1839		Commons	Deutsch
Elias Gottlob Haussmann, Johann Sebastian Bach, 1748		Commons	Hofstadter
Ouroboros, Greek alchemical manuscript copied by Theodoros Pelecanos, 1478		Commons	Hofstadter
Henri Rousseau, The Dream, 1910	Museum of Modern Art, New York	Commons	Joscha Bach
Attributed to Caravaggio, Narcissus, c. 1597–99	Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Antica, Rome	Commons	Joscha Bach

Figures and videos

The interactive figures are hand-written SVG and JavaScript, with no tracking and no outside libraries, and they respect your device's reduced-motion setting. The videos are narrated with an AI voice, as on the Philosophy of Time films.