Daily Meh is an edited stream of consciousness, by Simen.

Daniel Dennett: Autobiography (Part 1)

Dennett’s first academic years, in his own words. The following note on teaching is interesting:

Gilbert Ryle himself was the other pillar of support I needed. (…) He disliked and disapproved of the reigning Oxford fashion of clever, supercilious philosophical one-upmanship, and disrupted it when he could. He never ‘fought back’. In fact, I tried to provoke him, with elaborately-prepared and heavily-armed criticisms of his own ideas, but he would genially agree with all my good points as if I were talking about somebody else, and get us thinking what repairs and improvements we could together make of what remained. It was disorienting, and my opinion of him then — often expressed to my fellow graduate students, I am sad to say — was that while he was wonderful at cheering me up and encouraging me to stay the course, I hadn’t learned any philosophy from him.

The opposite turned out to be the case:

On the eve of submitting [the dissertation], I came across an early draft of it, and compared the final product with its ancestor. To my astonishment, I could see Ryle’s influence on every page. How had he done it? Osmosis? Hypnotism? This gave me an early appreciation of the power of indirect methods in philosophy. You seldom talk anybody out of a position by arguing directly with their premises and inferences. Sometimes it is more effective to nudge them sideways with images, examples, helpful formulations that stick to their habits of thought.