I’ve Been Thinking

I’ve recently finished reading Daniel Dennett’s latest book I’ve Been Thinking.  I loved it, within minutes of finishing it, I wrote Dennett to extend an invite for him to join us on the podcast.  It’s a long shot, but if I learned anything from reading Dennett’s memoir it’s that taking long shots are an indispensable ingredient to living a remarkable life.  Remarkable doesn’t necessarily amount to “good” but swinging for the fences is more noteworthy than riding the pine.

If you’ve never heard of Daniel Dennett, he’s a philosopher who has made significant contributions in several areas, especially cognitive science, and philosophy of mind.  Dennett spent the majority of his teaching career at Tufts University in Massachusetts.  In addition to teaching at Tufts, Dennett served as the director of the Center for Cognitive Studies.  He graduated from Harvard and then went on to graduate school at Oxford.  Along the way, Dennett was fortunate to cross paths with some of the most brilliant philosophers of the last century including studying under W.V. Quine and Gilbert Ryle.

I’ve read most of Dennett’s work, he’s an outstanding writer with a talent for making some of the most complex ideas and arguments digestible for those both in and outside the world of philosophy.  Consciousness Explained is truly spectacular, and perhaps Dennett’s most outstanding work.  I was lucky enough to read Darwin’s Dangerous Idea as an undergrad and remember vividly exactly where I was when I finished it.  That book is one of the reasons I switched my concentration from Ethics to Philosophy of Mind.  More recently Dennett published Intuition Pumps which is among the books I recommend most to undergrad philosophy students and those looking to level up their philosophy skills.  I think Dennett is a superb philosopher and I wholeheartedly encourage anyone interested in philosophy to take a look at some of his works.

Now that we’re through the Dennett lovefest we can get back to his latest book.

Aside from being the best memoir I’ve ever read (it’s the only memoir I’ve ever read), I’ve been Thinking has inspired me to try and do more.  Not necessarily in a quantitative way, I usually burn the candles at both ends, but in a qualitative way.  I spend a lot of my time reading books.  Throughout my life I’ve thought that hanging out with people like Plato, Joyce, Dennett, Nietzsche, Aristotle, de Beauvoir, Yalom, and Thoreau for example offered the best possible set of friends and colleagues a person could ask for.  I still think the same is true, but people like Dennett don’t become who they are with their nose eternally stuck between the pages of a book.  Spending time with Tom, Dick, and Harry, and Julia, and Rachel, and Mary offer something that Emerson, Anscombe, and even Dennett can’t offer.  That is, the opportunity to respond, engage personally, and feel awkward around.  Of course, I engage with my students, climbers, family, and colleagues all the time, but I don’t engage with these people in the same way that I engage with a good book or journal article.  I’d like to try and amend that.

Of course, Dennett’s life is filled with the digestion of hundreds of thousands pages from books that he’s read along the way, but his memoir is filled with memories of conversations and vivid experiences that were shared by the people in his life.

That’s inspirational, and it’s motivated me in a sense to engage in conversations with more people who exist outside the bindings of a front and back cover, as well as others who exist outside the world of those who I am comfortable around.  I want to swing for the fences a little more, and I want to strike out a little more.  I want to do this in ways that are uncomfortable, and hopefully once or twice along the way I’ll make contact with the ball.  I’m not sure exactly what the difference between a markable life and remarkable life is, but without taking a few more risks I’m not sure I’ll find out.

• Cover Photo from LUIS GRAÑENA, published in El Pais – Daniel C. Dennett, the fourth ‘horseman’ of atheism. LOLA GALÁN. Oct 29, 2023.