I am not joking when I say that I have had to forgive my friends who said that they were praying for me. I have resisted the temptation to respond “Thanks, I appreciate it, but did you also sacrifice a goat?”
I am not joking when I say that I have had to forgive my friends who said that they were praying for me. I have resisted the temptation to respond “Thanks, I appreciate it, but did you also sacrifice a goat?” I feel about this the same way I would feel if one of them said “I just paid a voodoo doctor to cast a spell for your health.”
we now have quite solid grounds (e.g., the recently released Benson study at Harvard) for believing that intercessory prayer simply doesn’t work. Anybody whose practice shrugs off that research is subtly undermining respect for the very goodness I am thanking.
But then there are the antiphilosophers, who look at the mess made by the others and say to themselves, “Fie! I’m going to try to clear this all up!”
how that might run. And I kept philosophical phisticuffs
there were my long-standing battles with my fellow philosophers Thomas Nagel, Jerry Fodor, John Searle, and David Chalmers. Where would I be without all these brilliant mistakes to correct,
There are lessons to be learned from how I handled my own education and how I became such a good thinker.
(The philosopher Don Ross once said of me, “Dan believes modesty is a virtue to be reserved for special occasions.”)
“There are much cleverer chaps than Dennett, but he has a fire in his belly.”
John Searle, one of my most aggressive critics, is actually a lot like me: sure of himself, impatient with nitpicking philosophers, willing to brand respected trains of thought as nonsense.
there are dozens, hundreds, of “distinguished” philosophers who show no signs (to me) of having harbored these insecurities, but I think their work is in general superficial and meretricious—dazzling footwork on issues of no real importance.
“Chmess” is my name for a variation on chess in which the king can move two squares in any direction. It’s probably never been played or ever been worth playing, and it’s not worth finding out. Proving truths about chmess is no doubt as challenging as proving truths about chess, but much less important. Nobody cares or should care.
one night we particularly got it together and played some amazing jazz. The next day, I said to Stan that I wished it had been recorded, and he jumped on me. “NO! Don’t try to accumulate things like that as if they made you somehow better. Last night was a trip. Be grateful it happened, but now let go of it.”
Their students get to take regular Tufts courses, for credit, and I love it when Conservatory or Museum School students show up in my classes. They don’t care about grades; they’re in it for intellectual thrills and are typically audacious and keen critics.
perspicuity.”
“Rigor has not, in general, been compromised in favor of perspicuity.”
Years later I think I have finally figured out what it was about Quine that inspired me: he wanted to fix what was broken in the way philosophical problems were being explored.
I decided, as only a freshman could, that I had to go to Harvard and confront this man with my corrections to his errors!
(A curious but negligible fact
He was also a bold brandisher of metaphors, describing one of our housemates in a published interview as “a cross between Reinhold Niebuhr and an eagle.” He began one of his little talks to us with “I think we can divide recent history into three ages: the age of Sir Walter Scott, the age of F. Scott Fitzgerald, and the age of Scott tissues.”
I was introduced to Federico Fellini in a restaurant on Via Veneto, had no idea who he was, and asked him what he did. He told me. Oh. My dinner companion that night was a movie actress named Didi Perego, and while we were dining a couple who knew her arrived at our table and they all had a good laugh after some Italian talk that went by too fast for me to follow. “What’s so funny?” I asked Didi in English. She replied in her makeshift English, “Oh, they were thinking to have a meal with much garlic, and then they decided no, because later they are going to kiss themselves.”
His last book, The Structure of Evolutionary Theory (2002), published just before his death, is a gigantic book, including many tirades, but fortunately for his reputation it is almost unreadable, so it hasn’t had much influence.
My title was “Turing’s Strange Inversion and John Searle’s Failure of Imagination,” which echoed a favorite theme of mine: philosophers and scientists who mistake a failure of imagination for an insight into necessity.
Bo Dahlbom came up with the perfect aphorism on the topic: “You can’t do much carpentry with your bare hands and you can’t do much thinking with your bare brain.”