E.O. Wilson is a biologist. Daniel C. Dennett is a philosopher. Both believe that understanding evolution is essential to understanding our humanity. Despite an incipient blizzard, they met up in the spring of 2004 to talk about God, evolution, incest, and of course, ants. This was their conversation.
Edward Wilson: To get the ball rolling, those are fabulous books of yours.
Daniel Dennett: Thank you. Consilience is a fabulous book of yours. Along with many others.
EW: Well, thank you. It seems to me that the thing we have in common and why we can talk together—whereas I wouldn't be able to talk to most people in the humanities—is the perception that evolution is the key to understanding the human species. Where, in your judgment, is philosophy going, particularly the philosophy of science? Is there any merit to what Bertrand Russell once said that science is what we know and philosophy is what we don't know? How do you see the picture between philosophy and science?
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DD: I think that philosophy of science has actually become much better. We had our early period, which was very programmatic and was quite prepared to just figure out where science should go and where it shouldn't. And that was brave and foolhardy and it had some great moments, but people saw better, and now people in the philosophy of science have to be well-trained. You quoted Bertrand Russell. Science is what we know; philosophy is what we don't know. I'm actually content with that, because I view philosophy as what you're doing when you don't know what the right questions are. And that's not trivial. If you can help sort out the bafflement and controversy and smoke and battle, that's work worth doing.
You may want to disagree with this, but it probably isn't too important for an entomologist to know the history of the field going back to the eighteenth century. But it really is important to know the history of philosophy if you're going to do philosophy, and the reason is actually very simple. The history of philosophy is a history of very tempting mistakes, and the people that we study in the history of philosophy—Plato and Aristotle and Kant and all the rest—they were not dummies. They were really smart people and they made stunning errors. These are very tempting mistakes. So you really have to learn the history of philosophy if you're going to do it well. Or you have to learn some of it. Because otherwise you just reinvent the wheel. You end up falling in the same old traps.
EW: Well put. I tried to encapsulate that similar notion by saying that philosophy consists of the history of failed models of the brain.
DD: Not just failed models of the brain, failed models of everything [Laughs]
EW: [Laughs] It's true. Let me press this matter just a little bit further without descending into the abyss. Suppose that a young neuroscientist with a conception of how the brain might work proceeded with the most advanced technology. Suppose he chose not to look at the blind alleys of the past but to press on from this new phenomenology that's being produced. Wouldn't they succeed just as well?
