Dennett

I just read the first 25 pages of Darwin's Dangerous Idea, and found it quite inspiring. Maybe that's because I'm acutely aware that I'm in desperate need of some inspiration right now, or maybe Daniel Dennett's book is just that good on its own regardless of the mental state of its reader. Anyway, I keep thinking that going back to school and getting a PhD and being some kind of career academic is the most appropriate career path for me, but I'm still not sure exactly what to study. Richard Dawkins calls Dennett "that scientifically savvy philosopher" and after 25 pages I'm optimistic that his brilliantly articulated insights into philosophy and science will help me sort things out a bit.

Dennett summarizes Aristotle's four basic "causes" of human curiosity:

(1) We may be curious about what something is made of, its matter or material cause.
(2) We may be curious about the form (or structure or shape) that that matter takes, its formal cause.
(3) We may be curious about its beginning, how it got started, or its efficient cause.
(4) We may be curious about its purpose or goal or end (as in "Do the ends justify the means?"), which Aristotle called its telos, sometimes translated in English, awkwardly, as "final cause."

The fourth, telos, is most associated with the question "why?" Concern with the telos of things seems to me (and to Dennett) to be a common feature of humanity. We want to know "why." Dennett relates the question of "why?" to Darwinism:

Whenever Darwinism is the topic, the temperature rises, because more is at stake than just the empirical facts about how life on Earth evolved, or the correct logic of the theory that accounts for those facts. One of the precious things that is at stake is a vision of what it means to ask, and answer, the question "Why?" Darwin's new perspective turns several traditional assumptions upside down, undermining our standard ideas about what ought to count as satisfying answers to this ancient and inescapable question. Here science and philosophy get completely intertwined. Scientists sometimes deceive themselves into thinking that philosophical ideas are only, at best, decorations or parasitic commentaries on the hard, objective triumphs of science, and that they themselves are immune to the confusions that philosophers devote their lives to dissolving. But there is no such thing as philosophy-free science; there is only science whose philosophical baggage is taken on board without examination.

I'm very impressed with this insight (and so are others). This idea is similar to Dawkins' notion that understanding Darwinism is a consciousness raiser, a powerful example of how the appearance of design can be misleading. I think why Dennett's phrasing seems so brilliant to me is that it specifically distinguishes the science and the philosophy, the philosophical implications of Darwin's idea being that there is a good way to answer a repeated chain of "why" questions instead of the resignation of ending with "because of god."

So, I'm inspired for two main reasons I think. First, I'm hoping to clear up some of my muddled thinking about academic options, and Dennett already seems like he'll be a hot knife through muddled butter. And second, I like how he's is explaining how an extremely powerful idea is commonly underappreciated, because I have a list of ideas that I think are underappreciated.

Not that I expect anyone to understand based on this disorganized gushing how one thing leads to another, but this kind of helped me realize that more important than picking the right thing to study is to just get back in school and studying anything and let it all work itself out. Philosophy and science, psychology and anthropology and whatever else, they're all connected. I should just get in somewhere, and just go wherever it takes me.