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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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