At last, someone has taken the proper measure of Dan Dennett, who comes up short.

Dan Dennett has written and autobiography, I've Been Thinking. I suppose he has. Stuart Jeffries reviews it in The Guardian. He opens with the story of how Dennett came up with the idea that his brain might very well have been in a vat, "which, he tells us proudly here, powerfully influenced the makers of The Matrix." Jeffries then goes on about some this and some that, including the fallout from Dennett's 1991 Consciousness Explained, and that leads to this wonderful paragraph:

These are deep matters and yet Dennett is an unreliable guide to them. His memoir involves more chippy score-settling with intellectual opponents, some of them long dead, than is dignified. But Dennett is a conceited fellow: it takes someone with an overdeveloped sense of self and an underdeveloped sense of tact to write the following: “The philosopher Don Ross once said of me: ‘Dan believes modesty is only a virtue to be reserved for special occasions.’” My copy is now dotted with marginal “ughs” to register my irritation at some piece of professorial preening. Even when Dennett tells us the truth about himself – namely, that he is one of the few philosophers to get out of the armchair to study neuroscience, artificial intelligence, computer science and psychology – the tone is boastful. He is unremittingly self-hagiographic, confirming the notion that autobiography can be the lowest of literary genres. He transforms an interesting thinker into a dull protagonist.

YES.

I've always thought Dennett coasted through his career on a vast sea of cleverness while avoiding the need to think deeply about anything. Well, yes, that's a bit of an exaggeration. He has written a thing or three that I've liked, something about patterns as I recall. But that's not enough to balance out the damage he's done, in particular, for all the nonsense about memes that he's fostered.

I've posted a couple of working papers in which I critique various of his ideas: Dennett on Memes, Neurons, and Software, An Inquiry into & a Critique of Dennett on Intentional Systems, and Cultural Evolution, Memes, and the Trouble with Dan Dennett.