Review of Intuition Pumps And Other Tools for Thinking

Daniel C. Dennett
Rating: 3/5

I'm very critical of philosophy in general, but Dennett seems to be one of the few philosophers doing it (mostly) right. The book consists of a vast collection of small thinking tools for sousing out comprehension from complex concepts -- most of them are silly, but it's likely beneficial to skim through the first half of the book to see if any of them work for you.

What I found most fascinating, however, were the last few chapters. One was on "what is it like to be a philosopher" (apparently very circle-jerky; no big surprises there), and the other on "use the [thinking] tools; try harder" which is a good call to action for finding a use for critical thinking in ways which turn out to actually be useful.

I'd recommend this book to people with philosophical inklings but who distrust the field, and then I'd tell them to head over to lesswrong.com and see if any of it sticks. The rest of you -- those on-board with Dennett and those with no interest in philosophy -- stay away and go read Kahneman; it'll be a better use of your time.