Abstract

Fausto Caruana, Carmela Morabito and Simone Pollo discuss Daniel Dennett’s From Bacteria to Bach and Back. The authors critically survey the book and discuss some of its key topics from different theoretical viewpoints. Caruana analyzes Dennett’s reconstruction of the evolution of mind moving some critical suggestions derived from the pragmatist tradition in philosophy of mind. Morabito discusses some couples of opposing concepts used by Dennett and discusses his conclusion about the alternative between bottom-up and top-down processes in the evolution of mind. Pollo equally tackles Dennett’s opposition between bottom-up and top-down processes as it is presented in Dennett’s account of the evolution human culture and the presumed withdrawal of human civilization from Darwinian processes.