Dennett's life-long MO was the appeal to reason to the exclusion of mystery.
In my early mid-life, facing a chaotic world of gross conservative christian religious dogma, his posture felt agreeable to me because it seemed to offer a prospect for intellectual adaptation: don't assume magic for what you don't understand.
But it also never felt welcome to me because he comes off as an authoritarian.
As I've become more sensitive to the limits of explanation I've become more interested in how the philosopher encounters the limits of his own language and in this area Dennett is notable for his awareness of limits, but shows no special traits of adaptation to these limits.
Like all philosophers he can't escape the bounds of his own undefined terms, e.g., "free will", and shuffles around the problem of scope by changing the subject to some other area to which he can speak with authority.
As he aged out he became a shaman for his own point of view.
He once appealed to the part of me that takes comfort in the reasoning of a strong father, but I lost the need for this.
It's clear to me that the mysteries not only aren't going away with more thought, but thought expands the mysteries to fill all available space.
In my limited exposure to his philosophy, he appeared to take no obvious joy in the mysterious, nor have any regard for it. He rarely said anything to the effect of the marvelous, i.e, "it's really strange things work this way"
Contrast with Feynman.
Dan Dennett has now crossed over into the fullness of mystery, and I'm skeptical that his philosophy was much solace to him during the trial of that passing. I doubt he took Pascal's wager.
In my early mid-life, facing a chaotic world of gross conservative christian religious dogma, his posture felt agreeable to me because it seemed to offer a prospect for intellectual adaptation: don't assume magic for what you don't understand.
But it also never felt welcome to me because he comes off as an authoritarian.
As I've become more sensitive to the limits of explanation I've become more interested in how the philosopher encounters the limits of his own language and in this area Dennett is notable for his awareness of limits, but shows no special traits of adaptation to these limits.
Like all philosophers he can't escape the bounds of his own undefined terms, e.g., "free will", and shuffles around the problem of scope by changing the subject to some other area to which he can speak with authority.
As he aged out he became a shaman for his own point of view.
He once appealed to the part of me that takes comfort in the reasoning of a strong father, but I lost the need for this.
It's clear to me that the mysteries not only aren't going away with more thought, but thought expands the mysteries to fill all available space.
In my limited exposure to his philosophy, he appeared to take no obvious joy in the mysterious, nor have any regard for it. He rarely said anything to the effect of the marvelous, i.e, "it's really strange things work this way"
Contrast with Feynman.
Dan Dennett has now crossed over into the fullness of mystery, and I'm skeptical that his philosophy was much solace to him during the trial of that passing. I doubt he took Pascal's wager.