Daniel Dennett and the purpose of philosophy

A decade or so ago I found myself sharing a stage with the late Lewis Wolpert, the developmental biologist and science communicator. We’d been invited to debate the question, “Has science killed philosophy?”

A couple of years earlier the great theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking had declared that “philosophy is dead” — largely on account of its failure, as he saw it, to keep up with the latest scientific developments, particularly in his own field. And Wolpert thought Hawking was “absolutely right”.

“What is philosophy about,” he asked. “What has it discovered?” My fumbling attempts to suggest that the practice of science carries with it a number of unexamined philosophical assumptions — about the nature of causal inference, say, or scientific explanation more generally — that could be usefully unpacked fell on deaf ears.

I was reminded of this episode last week when Richard Dawkins posted on X about his friend, the philosopher Daniel Dennett, who has died at the age of 82. “Dan Dennett was a great philosopher,” Dawkins wrote, “but unlike many clever philosophers . . . he had something to be clever ABOUT, namely science.” 

The implication is that most philosophy is an arid, self-enclosed activity with a fatal tendency, as Dennett himself put it, to “degenerate into high-concept pissing contests”. 

Re-reading Dennett in the days since he died, I’ve been struck by how much effort he put into separating his own work on the philosophy of mind (one of his best-known books is entitled Consciousness Explained) from the mainstream of the subject. “Many projects in contemporary philosophy,” he wrote, “are artifactual puzzles of no abiding significance.”

His scattered autobiographical writings, including a memoir published last year, are suffused with a sense of keenly nurtured separateness that appears to have first set in when he was an undergraduate at Harvard in the early 1960s.

Dennett settled on a career in philosophy early on, but was determined to be “a rather different philosopher from those around” him. When he later arrived in Oxford to read for a postgraduate degree he was surrounded by people “weirdly complacent in their ignorance of brains and psychology”.

The germ of his life’s work was planted there: explaining how “brains could be, or support, or explain, or cause minds”. In other words, how to give a naturalistic or mechanistic explanation of consciousness that didn’t depend on mystery or magic of any sort — such as Descartes’ mind-body dualism with its immaterial soul that Dennett’s teacher Gilbert Ryle famously dubbed the “ghost in the machine”.

There is something exhilarating about watching Dennett set about dismantling philosophical arguments like Descartes’ that flatter our settled assumptions about what the mind must be. It is one thing, he argued, to feel the “tug” of the thought that there is surely more to consciousness than the churning of some neurological machine; but quite another to “credit” it.

A distinctive view of the role of philosophy follows from all this. Dennett thought the philosopher’s job was to be a kind of under-labourer to the natural sciences, to offer “conceptual clarifications and underpinnings for theories that are testable, empirical, scientific”.

Now, you don’t have to think that philosophy has some special subject matter of its own, over and above the deliverances of scientific observation, to find that vision of the enterprise somewhat narrow, if not stunted.

The late Bernard Williams once said that one of the problems with what he called the “scientistic philosophy of mind” (that is, philosophy which aspires to the condition of science) is that it can never reproduce the rigour of neurophysiological research proper. It tends to end up, Williams observed, sounding more like the “discourse of scientists when they are off-duty”.

As it happens, Williams agreed with Dennett that a lot of what goes on in university departments of philosophy is “unhelpful, boring [or] sterile”. If philosophy is to succeed in making the best possible sense of the intellectual activities of human beings, it ought to acknowledge its links with “other ways of understanding ourselves” — with history or literature, for example.

Perhaps the problem with Dennett’s approach was that he thought there was only one mode of understanding worth the candle.

jonathan.derbyshire@ft.com