Profile: Daniel Dennett

The following correction was printed in the Guardian's Corrections and Clarifications column, Thursday April 22 2004 The seminar at which Stephen Jay Gould was rigorously questioned by Dennett's students was Dennett's seminar at Tufts, not Gould's at Harvard. Dennett wrote Darwin's Dangerous Idea before, not after, Gould called him a "Darwinian fundamentalist". Dan Dennett is a sailor, with a billowing white beard and moustaches that he twiddles when thinking. He uses "salty" as a term of praise and has just bought a 42ft boat that sleeps five and could, if he wished, cross the Atlantic. His passion for sailing may be the best way to approach his philosophy. In both, un-charted and dangerous areas are to be navigated by explorers ingeniously equipped. Like all sailors, he has stories. One concerns a French couple he met when sailing off Greenland. They were on their honeymoon, sailing from France to Iceland, then Greenland, and finally, in one long reach, from Greenland to the Falklands.