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“After reading the review,” Andrew Brown reported in the Guardian , “Ruse, sitting in Florida, could not resist sending a jeering email to Dennett. This was not, he now says, a very Christian thing to do. ‘But it was funny.’” He said he looked “with fear and trembling” every Sunday for the “scathing letter” about his “inadequacies”. Dennett replied that the New YorkTimes hadn’t Times hadn’t Times published the letter, and that the Wieseltier review indicated why: “I think the NYTBR is under the spell of the Darwin dreaders.” Dennett went on to offer a caution that Ruse was “being enlisted on the side of the forces of darkness” and added that he did associate Ruse’s “evolutionism” coinage with terms like “reductionism” and “scientism” and that he thought Ruse was “doing a disservice to the cause of taking science seriously.” Ruse replied rather heatedly: “I am a full professor with tenure at a university known chiefl y for its prowess on the football fi eld, living out my retirement years in the sunshine – I have no reputation to preserve, and frankly can say and do whatever the fuck I want to without sinking further.” He pointed out that he defended evolution in the 1981 McLean v Arkansas case, when it wasn’t a McLean v Arkansas case, when it wasn’t a McLean v Arkansas popular thing to do. Then he delivered a caution of his own: “I think that you and Richard are absolute disasters in the fi ght against intelligent design.” He said what is needed is not “knee-jerk atheism but serious grappling with the issues” and that defenders of evolution are in a fi ght, and “we need to make allies in the fi ght, not simply alienate everyone of good will.” Dennett replied emolliently: “I’ll wait before replying to you. I doubt that you mean all the things you say here. Think it over.” What happened next was that Ruse sent the exchange to Dembski and then gave him unilateral permission to publish it. This Dembski did, on February 21, without (as noted) asking Dennett. I emailed Dembski, twice, about the ethics of publishing a correspondence with permission from only one party to it, but he made no reply. I also asked Ruse, and he was quite frank, saying he was happy to take on any blame – “makes me sound a bit like Jesus taking on the sins of others, but [you] will know what I mean”. He explained why: “But if one is attacked then I think it is fair game to publish – Dennett was bullying me (“your reputation is going down”) and I was primed because he had already

The Philosophers' Magazine /3rd quarter 2006

Dennett’s revenge? Andrew Brown’s piece for the Guardian in March on the Ruse-Dennett exchange was moderately critical of Dennett and also fi nally brought the story to the wider public’s attention. In April he wrote another piece for the paper, profiling Dennett. If Dennett was at all irked by Brown’s pieces, he would have to have been extremely virtuous not to feel a little schadenfraude reading the following in the corrections and clarifi cations section of the paper a few days later: “In our profi le of Daniel Dennett (pages 20 to 23, Review, April 17), we said he was born in Beirut. In fact, he was born in Boston. His father died in 1947, not 1948. He married in 1962, not 1963. The seminar at which Stephen Jay Gould was rigorously questioned by Dennett’s students was Dennett’s seminar at Tufts, not Gould’s at Harvard. “Dennett wrote Darwin’s Dangerous Idea before, not after, Gould called him a ‘Darwin fundamentalist’. Only one chapter in the book, not four, is devoted to taking issue with Gould. The list of Dennett’s books omitted Elbow Room, 1984, and The Intentional Stance, 1987. The marble sculpture, recollected by a friend, that Dennett was working on in 1963 was not a mother and child. It was a man reading a book.”

sent a nasty (and in the event unpublished) note to the New York Times ... So my attitude then and New York Times ... So my attitude then and New York Times now is ‘to hell with him’.” The heat of the exchange should not be surprising. Ruse himself had already said that he was “going to be a very sorry person” if he didn’t get the expected “range of reactions from the irritated to the livid” from colleagues. In the light of this, Dennett’s criticism of his stance seems rather temperate. Philosophers care about their ideas and so it would be odd if there were no passion in their debates. The more vexing question surrounds whether it is right that private exchanges should be published without consent. In this case, and despite Ruse’s mea culpa , we do not seem to have an answer to that question yet.

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reporter/15

Why Franklin was really revolutionary

This year is the tricentennial of Benjamin Franklin’s birth – an occasion for more new books about him than the American public (let alone any single reader) will ever want to read. So they will have to be exported, I guess. That seems fi tting. Franklin was nothing if not a cosmopolitan fi gure, respected abroad as a scientist, author, and diplomat. And in old age, he was a capable romancer of femmes des lettres in Paris. lettres in Paris. lettres Following his death in 1790, though, his reputation was somehow de-globalised. He became a “founding father” for the United States, rather than a fi gure of the Enlightenment – a participant, that is, of a properly transatlantic intellectual movement. It was not just that the philosophes recognised philosophes recognised philosophes him, in his prime, as a fellow traveller. A streak of philosophical radicalism is evident in his earliest writings. I’m thinking especially of a short treatise he published at the age of 19 called A Dissertation on Liberty and Necessity, Pleasure and Pain. It presented a systematic account of his “ present a systematic account of his “ present a systematic account of his “ Thoughts present Thoughts present of the general State of Things in the Universe.” general State of Things in the Universe.” general State of Things At the time, Franklin was working as a printer in London, where he found himself stranded when a business deal went sour. He published a hundred copies of the essay and enjoyed a little coffee-house notoriety for his fl air with argumentation. And then – thinking better of it – Franklin tracked down and destroyed every copy of the pamphlet he could fi nd. He was provoked to write it while typesetting the new edition of a work of rationalistic theology. The author tried to prove that God had given human beings free will; that goodness and truth were two sides of the same coin; and that any seeming injustices in the world would be settled in the hereafter. Franklin had a deeply satirical temperament,

Scott McLemee is an essayist and book critic living in Washington DC

and he responded with a parody. His essay revealed an exposure to the ideas of John Locke, as well as the strict argumentative style prescribed by the Port Royal logicians in France. Maybe the result isn’t quite David Hume. But for a self-educated teenager from the wilds of North America, it is pretty impressive. Franklin starts with two simple propositions: “There is said to be a First Mover, who is called God, Maker of the Universe. He is said to be all-wise, all-good, all-powerful.” The way he frames these statements – treating them as received opinions and potentially open to question – is already a bit nervy. He then argues “a Chain of Consequences” that “will stand or fall as they are true or false.” If God is all-powerful, then nothing can exist without divine consent. And if God consents, it must be good, for God is all-good. If one of God’s creations behaves in a certain way – well, that creature is, after all, just as God made him. He is “able to do only such things as God would have him do.” Hence there is no free will. To suppose otherwise means doubting God’s omnipotence, omniscience, and/or perfect goodness. We are designed to avoid pain and seek pleasure. Indeed, the two impulses are identical. Hunger is painful, for example; its satisfaction, pleasurable. “Since Pain naturally and infallibly Pain naturally and infallibly Pain produces a Pleasure in proportion to it,” reasons Pleasure in proportion to it,” reasons Pleasure Franklin, “every individual Creature must, in any State of Life , have an equal quantity of each, so that there is not, on that Account, any Occasion for a future Adjustment.” (In other words, forget heaven and hell.) From bland pieties about a perfect supreme being, Franklin has deduced a world consistent with the most rigidly deterministic sort of materialism – one in which there is no free will, or afterlife, or even a meaningful distinction between good and evil. No French philosopher of the day would have made such an argument except by circulating an unsigned manuscript. (Diderot later got jail time for doing just that sort of thing.) That he became a revolutionary seems fi tting.

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The Philosophers' Magazine /3rd quarter 2006