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Books
I’ve Been Thinking by Daniel Dennett
Jane O’Grady is in two minds about Daniel Dennett.
A photo in Daniel Dennett’s new memoir I’ve Been Thinking shows the four-year-old Dennett perched on a bench and bending forward, bottom in the air, to solemnly examine a toy. Now eighty-one and a world-famous philosopher, Dennett has always loved tools and tinkering: making a tree-house and model sailboats during his childhood in Massachusetts; designing ‘robust’ computer software for computerphobic professors; restoring Blue Hill Farm where he, his wife, and children lived for forty-three years; ‘tillosophising’ on a tractor; acquiring mastery of his (real-life) sailboat Xanthippe; and, above all, creating a uniformly physical account of reality. Although some reviewers have accused Dennett of arrogance, in some ways he is disarmingly modest. He presents himself as an ever-inquisitive, adventurous amateur, whose ‘hobby’ consists of “reverse engineering a complex artefact to figure out what it was designed to do.” That’s what he does with one artefact produced by evolution’s slow machinations – the human mind.
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