Daniel Dennett

By Wayne Brown
I owe a huge debt to Daniel Dennet, which I will explain at length in an expanded version of this post when time permits. I think of him as a modern Kepler (1). Kepler had one foot in the Middle Ages (He was a court astrologer) and one foot in modern science (his observations laid the foundations for Newton's discovery of the laws of gravity - the first "scientific" laws). Dennett's suffers from a life spent as a professional philosopher, but is, at the same time, one of the most eloquent critics of philosophy as a bankrupt pursuit, irrelevant to the the real world problems faced by humanity.


Notes:
(1) Kepler's story is masterfully recounted in Koestler's "The Sleep Walkers"

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