The Fight Continues

Not surprisingly, Daniel Dennett responds to Leon Wieseltier's frontal assault on his latest in The New York Times Book Review. And Wieseltier answers.

Dennett takes his Darwin straight, and it's hard for a lot of people to deal with, especially non-scientists. Dennett wants to use evolution to explain just about everything. Alas, this often means reviewers go nuts and don't fairly represent him. I don't always agree with Dennett, but I always find him bracing, and generally bemoan his critics' lack of comprehension (or even competence).

Dennett, with some justification, but more thunder, complains Wieselter's review is more name-calling than serious discussion. (I agree that when people start throwing around words like "scientism" or "reductionist," they're generally avoiding the real argument in favor of cliches.)

The essence of their disagreement, seems to me, grows out of a position Wieseltier shares with many others. He doesn't want to be a dualist, but he also doesn't want to admit biology explains everything. This requires there be something kind of magical about what's going on, yet not supernatural, an untenable compromise with Dennett's Darwinian universal solvent. Certainly there are emergent properties (nothing amazing about that), and one can discuss various issues at different levels of abstraction. But that doesn't mean in researching "the autonomy of reason" (as Wieseltier has it), that we mustn't delve deeper into biology.