"Intuition pumps and other tools for thinking" is a mixed bag of goods. Don’t let the title fool you: this books is less about "thinking tools" than it is about Daniel Dennet's favorite philosophical thought experiments. Dennet devotes a short and wanting section to general 'thinking tools' (think Okham’s razor), but otherwise spends the majority of your time laying out his personal ideas concerning evolution, meaning, mind, and free will.First, the pros: the subject matter is fascinating, and D...

If you've read other Dennett masterpieces, you come away thinking both that the man is a genius and that he's a genius that tends to ramble on. That is not the case in his latest work. He combines many of his previous ideas and some new thoughts into this volume of brief insightful chapters. Dennett covers a wide range of philosophy favorites including consciousness, free will, determinism, artificial life, evolution, and meaning. He gives the reader tools to use when thinking about complex prob...

An intuition pump is a thought experiment or similar cognitive "device" designed to elicit answers to difficult philosophical problems. In --Intuition Pumps And Other Tools For Thinking-- Dennett uses his favorite intuition pumps to (sort of) dismantle difficult philosophical questions such as: evolution, meaning, mind, and free will.I avoided Dennett for a long time because he comes off as such a grumpy old dick in his lectures and Ted talks. I am pleasantly surprised to find that his writing i...

Reading this book is basically like reading Daniel Dennett in blog format.I read a lot of Dennett's work as an undergraduate and it had a fairly profound impact on me -- I think the collection "The Mind's I" that he edited with Douglas Hofstadter is essentially my atheist bible. I hadn't realized just how much of his work I had read -- almost nothing in this recent collection was new to me. I guess I hadn't realized (or had forgotten) that Dennett is a big fan of Sturgeon's Law (90% of everythin...

As clearly advertised on the front cover, this is a book about "tools for thinking"—and, yes, the first 12 chapters, out of 77, are devoted precisely to that. In contrast, the remaining 65 chapters are summaries, in easy to consume bites, of most of the other books that Dennett has published during the last 20 or 30 years, on the topics of meaning and content, evolution, consciousness, and free will—each updated with relevant new results and references. As such, he presents, and effectively argu...

Daniel C. Dennett cites himself a lot. Just sayin'.Right, so his thing is that free will and determinism are not incompatible. He's really big into non-incompatibles. the idea that you can predict the choice someone will make does not effect his ability to make that choice. So, its predictable that i would write this... but i still also made a choice to write it. i really hope he explains how this is so because i still don't get it. I had no idea this book would be so much about rhetoric, linqui...

I stayed with it until Consciousness, where I lost mine several times before limping to the end. The title is a misnomer; it is not a handy guide to navigating your decisions in life, etc, or even a practical 80 steps to improving your mind. It is a series of short chapters of philosophical tidbits designed to introduce as much of Dennett's own nomenclature as possible to see what sticks (immortality!), and in the meantime showing how terribly misguided his fellow philosophers are, supported by

What a mind... Dennett is that rarest of beings: a philosopher who presents his ideas undumbed down, and with crystal clarity, for a lay readership. Not only does he respect his untrained readers, he genuinely strives to educate them and to spur their own deeper learning and inquiry. The long and the short is this: every time I finish one of his books, I am (I think) smarter than I was when I began. It's amazing how much food for thought Dennett packs between the covers of each, and how artfully...

I had to quit after 68 pages. Dennett apparently had a class of freshmen review this book - I wish he would have had a couple actual philosophers review it as well. If you have an understanding of philosophy and basic thinking tools, this book is not for you. If you already are an independent thinker, this book is not for you. If you are easily impressed by name-dropping and misleading examples, this book is for you.The book starts out poorly with way too much name-dropping and Dennett admitting...

I liked this well enough. Dennett can write clearly and engagingly. But I never got over the nasty taste in my mouth induced by some really mean-spirited drive-by ad hominem assassination of someone I guess Dennett still holds a shiv for -- Stephen Jay Gould. The odd thing is that, on the issues in question, intellectually I would side with Dennett rather than Gould. But continuing to attack an opponent after the person in question is dead and in no position to mount a defence strikes me as bein...

It's ironic that Dennett concludes his book with a chapter on why philosophy is still valuable, because halfway through it I was starting to toy with the idea that the world would be better off if philosophy departments all over it were shut down and its inhabitants told to find a real job :-) But first, a disclaimer: I am firmly in the positivist camp, Dan is basically preaching to the choir here. Only he's doing it badly. But wait! What's this about preaching? Isn't this book about thinking t

Many who have read this probably came away believing that the title should really be extended a bit, adding “Tools for Thinking…like Daniel Dennett.” Which is great if you’re already a materialist like Dennett. The author doesn’t hide this at all. In fact he openly admits it. He would argue that whether or not a reader agrees with the way he thinks, they’d have to do some thinking in order to have an opinion one way or the other. And this is the primary goal of the book: to get whoever reads it

Didn't finish bc tons of unnecessary acerbic ad hominem attacks on Gould started to get very annoying. Superficial otherwise too.

First off, the title is a misnomer -- a clickbait of sorts. The discussion on intuition pumps lasts 40 pages (more on that later). The rest of it is tearing apart often ridiculous (to me at least) philosophical positions other philosophers had such as insisting on consciousness and free will are a black and white thing (false dichotomy). For instance, here is one on "understanding", which is a center piece target of Dennett's criticism and is the so-called Chinese Room thought experiment.Here's

Favorite sections include all/most of Section II: A Donzen General Thinking Tools - a clear set of tools to go out into the world with. "Rather"|"Surely" (ding!) And the following favorite chapters include: Murder in Trafalgar Square, Manifest Image and Scientific Image, The Intentional Stance, The Sorta Operator, The Library of Mendel: Vast and Vanishing, The Zombic Hunch, Zombies and Zimboes, and Heterophenomenology. Dennett is a writer that leads me to believe that I have some kind of adult/r...