He was controversial, but he was in my opinion one of the best all-around living philosophers. He was enormously influential on my own thinking, as well as kind and patient every time I met him. Enormously influential, and a big loss to the discipline.
There is no philosophy-free science; there is only science whose philosophical baggage was taken on board without examination.
Pouring one out for a real zombie
“A robot made up of smaller robots”
Dennett was much less of a dipshit about that stuff than the others were/are, and did come to somewhat regret his involvement with that movement after it fed into the alt-right. Breaking the Spell is a significantly more thoughtful and nuanced work than The God Delusion or whatever dumbfuck title Harris and Hitchens came up with, as you would expect from an actual philosopher. It’s worth a read, and (to my knowledge) he never went down the idiotic “anti-feminist” and “western chauvinist” pipeline that the others did. It’s an unfortunate association for sure and a black mark on his record, but it’s definitely not fair to put him in the same bucket as the other three in general.
That’s good to know. I remember when the Four Horsemen came out, it’s wild how different the political rhetoric around these individuals is a little bit flipped, comparing back then (the right hated them) and now (some of them got a little too cozy with Christian fundies).
Yeah, of the four he was definitely the least insufferable by far.
Hitchens was a typical Br*t and spent the latter part of his career larping as Winston Churchill, both in his politics and in his eagerness to advocate for the murdering of the brown people (not to mention constantly chasing the opportunity to drop some witty quip about how women are terrible or some shit). He’s the perfect example of the Trot-neocon pipeline and Normal Finkelstein’s Hitchens as Model Apostate is a really good article on the “why I left the left” aura that Hitchens commanded in the media, and this applies to every other ex-left grifter as well (it written two decades ago! Although the model apostate had been a phenomenon for at least half a century by this point - figures like Orlov and Bezmenov come to mind as prominent examples.)
The other two don’t even deserve my time aside from mentioning the fact that Dawkins, in The Selfish Gene, goes entirely off the rails in how he conceives of “memes” (in the original sense) and it illustrates why experts need to stay in their fucking lane because his argument takes everything that is evolution and transposes it onto a realm where none of the conditions for evolution exist.
It’s an interesting idea, I guess, but meme theory was an absurd overreach imo.
The other two don’t even deserve my time aside from mentioning the fact that Dawkins, in The Selfish Gene, goes entirely off the rails in how he conceives of “memes” (in the original sense) and it illustrates why experts need to stay in their fucking lane
Just to add on to this, Sam Harris isn’t even good in his own (ostensible) lane. His neuroscience PhD dissertation is almost shockingly bad. I have no idea how they awarded him the degree, except maybe just to get rid of him because he was so insufferable. Dawkins at least has some real and respectable scientific scholarship in his past; Sam Harris has never been anything but a grifter.
