Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking

As stated by other reviewers, this book is (1) tedious, (2) a rehash of past Dennettisms, and (3) a bait-and-switch. On the last point, it does not provide the "thinking tools" it promises. The short, numbered chapters give the illusion that the author is going to share a host of "thinking tools" when in fact said chapters are nothing more than...short, numbered chapters. I've liked Dennett's other books. Read those. Skip this one.

Being an engineer, I was totally uninitiated when I started reading this book that I bought at an airport stall. Perhaps this was my first 'modern' philosophy book and certainly my first Dennett book which gave me a unique flavor for what was to come.

The book is dense and a universe of ideas. The initial part of this book dives into what Dennett calls philosophical thinking tools and certainly it was both amusing and funny to read his descriptions of 'occam's broom', a 'deepity', 'rathering' among others. The rest of the book is what Dennett calls 'hot button issues', chefly the question of meaning, evolution, free will and consciousness. I greatly enjoyed chapters such as 'Interlude about Computers', 'the Chinese Room', 'Two Black Boxes'. which are all interesting investigations and thought experiments to tackle difficult questions.

While there is a universe of thinking tools littered in the book, what I found desirable but missing was an appraisal of the thinking tools and their chief limitations. Dennett himself says, after 430 pages, that 'we haven't yet succeeded in fully conceiving how meaning could exist in the material world, or how life arose and evolved, or how consciousness works' etc. So what are the limitations of the tools? Or are the way the tools are applied to ask the questions limited? And if we're still 'hot on the trail of answers', what good are all these tools he describes? Are more tools needed? Will he write another book on another set of tools?

Certainly the big questions of life are difficult to answer. And make no mistake, Dennett sincerely dives into these topics like a true scholar, perhaps better than anyone living amongst us in these times. But he falls victim to his own ambition. We're, alas, still on the 'hot trail' for answers. However, that keeps philosophers happy I suppose. There will be more to write.

If you have read Dennett's previous books, particularly 'Freedom Evolves', and 'Darwin's Dangerous Idea', some portions of this book will sound very familiar, as it is largely based on previously published chapters, papers, and articles. That said, this is a very enjoyable read, an excellent guide to clear thinking based on more than 70 conceptual tools. It is to be praised that Dennett always strive for clarity and concision, even working in a field so prone to obscurity.

This is a very interesting and clever book. Critics will complain the author has an agenda. Others will recognize this agenda as narrative. The author does an excellent job choosing intuition pumps to make his point while providing a narrative to tie it all altogether in a readable package. You don't have to believe it, you can simply regard it as information. But you could also re-frame your current beliefs by devaluing their truth while regarding them simply as information too. Throughout this book, the author leads us to conclusions but sometimes leaves it up to the reader to make the relevant connections for ourselves. His take on freewill is different than I've read before and I enjoyed it.
So what is the narrative? When it comes to the complexities of human consciousness, Intelligent Design seems optional. We all are complex "AI" machines with billions of years of development and design behind us. All and all it's very interesting information.

Daniel Dennett's ] is a very interesting and worthwhile book. I'm glad that I read it. But I would note that it has a misleading title. While there are many (77 is one number mentioned) intuition pumps and other tools for thinking in this book, it is really not about thinking tools per se. Rather it is an extended exercise in thinking about consciousness leading up to a too-brief discussion of free will and determinism.

Dennett makes a very strong case for materialism, the view that there is nothing supernatural, and compatibilism, the view that free will and determinism are logically compatible. Good for him! But I do wish that the book had a more accurate title.

With regard to the title, Daniel Dennett observes, "Intuition pumps have been a dominant force in philosophy for centuries. They are the philosophers' version of Aesop's fables, which have been recognized as wonderful thinking tools since before they were philosophers. If you ever studied philosophy in college, you were probably exposed to such classics as Plato's cave, in The Republic, in which people are chained and can see only shadows of real things cast on the cave wall; or his example, in Meno, of reaching geometry to the slave boy."

When I cam upon this passage of the Introduction, I was indeed reminded of Plato's "Allegory of the Cave" as well as the Grand Inquisitor chapter in When I came upon that passage in the Introduction, I was reminded of The Grand Inquisitor, a parable told by Ivan to his brother Alyosha in Fyodor Dostoyevsky's novel The Brothers Karamazov. In fact, I can think of dozens of stories that illustrate key insights while suggesting all manner of connotative meaning and significance to the components of the given narrative.

Dennett explains that some of the most powerful thinking tools are mathematical, "but aside from mentioning them, I will not devote much space to them because this is a book celebrating the power of [begin italics] non [end italics] -mathematical tools, [begin italics] informal [end italics] tools, the tools of prose and poetry, if you like, a power that scientists often underestimate." Dennett certainly does not make that error of judgment, noting that a good intuition pump "is more robust that any one version of it." That said, he offers dozens of examples of the pumps as well as of other tools for more effective thinking. Think of this book as a toolbox and all of Dennett's 15 books as a hardware store. In fact, in Chapter IX, "What Got Left Out," he briefly discusses several of his favorite intuition pumps such as "Where am I?" and Peter Godfrey-Smith's Darwinian Spaces, "the best use of multidimensional space as a thinking tool in philosophy that I know."

The material is presented in the form of 77 segments or mini-commentaries in which Dennett sequentially provides an abundance of information, insights, counsel, and (yes) entertainment as he introduces and explains dozens of intuition pumps and other thinking tools, then shifts his and the reader's attention to a brief explanation of why conceiving of something new is so difficult. After an exceptionally thoughtful and thought-provoking Introduction, he then introduces each of sections II-VIII and adds a Summary of their key points. This one of very few books that I have read that strengthens the cognitive skills of those who read it [begin italics] while they read it [end italics].

These are among the several dozen passages of special interest and value to me, also listed to indicate the scope of Dennett's coverage.

Segment #1: Making Mistakes (Pages 19-28)
9: Three Species of [Stephen Jay] Goulding: Rathering, Piling On, and the Gould Two-Step (48-52)
16: Manifest Image and Scientific Image (69-72)
20: A Cascade of Homunculi (91-95)
24: The Seven Secrets of Computer Power Revealed (109-132)
29. The Wandering Two-Bitser, Twin Earth, and the Giant Robot (157-174)
33: Two Black Boxes (184-196)
39: Competence without Comprehension" (232-233)
45: Widowmakers, Mitochondrial Eve, and Retrospective Coronations (247-251)
50: Noise in the Virtual Hotel (267-270)
54: The Zombie Hunch (283-287)
60: The Chinese Room (319-329)
65: A Truly Nefarious Neurosurgeon (357-358)
67: Rock Paper, and Scissors (370-374)
73: Ultimate Responsibility (393-396)

When concluding this book, Daniel Dennett observes: "We haven't yet succeeded in fully conceiving how meaning could exist in the material world, or how life arose and evolved, or how consciousness works, or whether free will can be one of our endowments, but we've made progress: the questions we're posing and addressing now are better than the questions of yesteryear. We're hot on the trail of the answers." I am certain that he will be in the forefront of those who find them.

Philosophy (by which I mean technical or academic or logical philosophy -- not mysticism or tips for living) has its fairly unique set of fallacies to watch out for. And by that I mean fallacies that are taught in philosophy by philosophers to guide students away from pitfalls many smart people have stumbled into over the long history of philosophy.

Many of these fallacies simply don't come up in most other contexts. Except perhaps in computing, where an infinite loop or a recursive stack overflow resembles an implementation of a vicious infinite regress in software.

Dennett is an old favorite of mine from philosophy of mind. So clear, and with a computational bent. His tools for thinking are thought provoking and helpful when reading some contemporary philosophers who sometimes let their philosophical guard down when they are writing for a lay audience. Some big name philosophers make big mistakes when writing outside their field. And this is sad, because philosophy well practiced is capable of clarifying just about any field of endeavor.

Well, Daniel Dennett pulls some big names up short. Reins them in. And spurs them to do better philosophy. And has helped me to lift my game and learn something new under the sun.

"Intuition Pumps And Other Tools for Thinking" is full of Dennett's favorite thought-experiments and thinking tools to help you navigate your way through some of today's most difficult problems and questions. Dennett also makes sure to include bad thinking tools since these lead people astray and obscure the picture.

The book is broken up into parts, each corresponding to an area Dennett has made contributions to. The areas include Meaning, Computers, Evolution, Consciousness, Free Will, and what it's like to be a philosopher. Though each section was strong and definitely whet my intellectual appetite to delve further into each topic, I'd say the book's strongest points were on Evolution and Consciousness.

Without spoiling any of the `intuition pumps' Dennett uses, these two sections comprised the pumps I found most helpful when thinking about their respective topics. Yes, the other pumps Dennett offers the reader are great and have helped shed new light on old problems, but given my prior interest in both evolution and neuroscience/consciousness, these two definitely piqued my interest the most.

Overall, the book was very well written, concise, and full of humor. Many people find philosophy books dry and boring. Dennett realizes this and make each chapter fun and interesting. You may not agree with everything Dennett has to say, but he's a great thinker and definitely one to know.

For the curious mind, you will find this book provides bite sized and accessible descriptions of some tools to help you think about big topics including meaning, consciousness, evolution and free will. A section on computers has some exercises for a simple register machine which completely nerd-sniped me; it is such a brilliantly simple tool to remove any mystery behind computers and build a nice firm example of competence without comprehension, a theme important to many of the big ideas in the book.

Many of the ideas you will have considered in one form of the other, but this book helps you formalise them a little (which makes discussions and reading further literature much easier), and also relates these ideas to other topics. Some other ideas you might not have considered in detail before, and you will find this book opens up those topics for you.

I would be inclined to suggest that the book is more appropriate for newcomers or amateurs in philosophy, but given Dennett suggests the use of lay audiences as decoys in order to avoid underexplaining (as often happens between experts), the expert philosopher may well find such a book a useful review of a portion of their toolkit whilst avoiding excessive jargon.

The title of the book is "Intuition Pumps, and Other Tools for Thinking" and the author is Daniel C. Dennet, who identifies himself as a philosopher. Yet, he tells us that he now spends less time with philosophers and more time with scientists and other thinkers. He feels he is halfway between the two camps. That he has made that transition explains why I enjoyed reading the book from cover to cover. Had he stayed a full-fledged philosopher, that resulting book might have been less appealing to me and I probably would have lost interest before completing it. I have become increasingly pragmatic as I have gotten older, and nowadays feel as though I am wasting precious time, when an author becomes too abstract or talks in generalities. In sharp contrast, I recall that "Introduction to Philosophy" was one of my two most favorite courses in college. The other one was "Physical Anthropology". Obviously, my tastes have changed with time. Perhaps early in life, we are sampling new ideas in a process to define ourselves. As we get older, we grow more content with who we are. Moreover, we realize that the time remaining in our lives is our most precious commodity. We no longer are willing to waste it.

Dennett and I might have been close friends, if we had ever shared ideas face-to-face. It seems that we both have been intrigued by the same intellectual pursuits. He has a lot to say about evolutionary theory and is a admirer of Richard Dawkins, as am I. He also has dabbled a bit in computer programming and is drawn to artificial intelligence. I wish he had been around when I was attempting to teach myself Assembly Language. He has elementary lessons in register programming in the book with more such material in the appendix. He discusses chess in the book, one of my lifelong enjoyments and an exercise for the mind in logical thinking ( as is computer programming). Robotics is yet another field for logical thinking and ties into our last common interest, namely, animal and human consciousness. Of course, Dennett and I have never met face-to-face, so reading his book has been an enjoyable, but one-sided experience. He is a much deeper thinker than I am, so the book has been educational for me.

The book consists of a series of different mind experiments, drawing mainly from the subject areas listed above. Dennett analyzes test concepts, which he calls "intuition pumps" for their value as tools in our future thinking. If you are skeptical of this approach, remember that Albert Einstein made many of his breakthrough using thinking experiments. Dennett's analyses amount to what he refers to as turning the dials on the intuition pump and seeing how it holds up. The latter chapters and their concepts are examined using the tools, he has taught us in the earlier chapters. Hopefully, I have described the book contents clearly enough for you to decide whether or not it would interest you. I enjoyed the book and hope that you do too.

Ralph D. Hermansen, June 23, 2013

I have to admit there are really good paragraphs in the book, but the author is a philosopher and keeps wandering around the chapter's central idea through the pages... And, between lines, asks the same unanswerable questions every philosopher has ever asked: Does God exists? Why are we here? blah, blah, blah. My point is: the author is not practical at all, just wanders around philosophical and byzantine-like questions that leaves the book's title senseless.

In an age where we are faced with a conglomeration of mental distractions, we all need to either upgrade our skills or develop new skills to help us focus and think more clearly. I also find that some of these tools go a long way to induce a sense of humor into our otherwise cranky default settings. Thank you Daniel C. Dennett. I expect to have this book handy for review....simply knowing its ideas and suggestions exist, helps. Wish it were possible to make this book mandatory reading in all high schools and college classrooms.

For the curious mind, you will find this book provides bite sized and accessible descriptions of some tools to help you think about big topics including meaning, consciousness, evolution and free will. A section on computers has some exercises for a simple register machine which completely nerd-sniped me; it is such a brilliantly simple tool to remove any mystery behind computers and build a nice firm example of competence without comprehension, a theme important to many of the big ideas in the book.

Many of the ideas you will have considered in one form of the other, but this book helps you formalise them a little (which makes discussions and reading further literature much easier), and also relates these ideas to other topics. Some other ideas you might not have considered in detail before, and you will find this book opens up those topics for you.

I would be inclined to suggest that the book is more appropriate for newcomers or amateurs in philosophy, but given Dennett suggests the use of lay audiences as decoys in order to avoid underexplaining (as often happens between experts), the expert philosopher may well find such a book a useful review of a portion of their toolkit whilst avoiding excessive jargon.

The title of the book is "Intuition Pumps, and Other Tools for Thinking" and the author is Daniel C. Dennet, who identifies himself as a philosopher. Yet, he tells us that he now spends less time with philosophers and more time with scientists and other thinkers. He feels he is halfway between the two camps. That he has made that transition explains why I enjoyed reading the book from cover to cover. Had he stayed a full-fledged philosopher, that resulting book might have been less appealing to me and I probably would have lost interest before completing it. I have become increasingly pragmatic as I have gotten older, and nowadays feel as though I am wasting precious time, when an author becomes too abstract or talks in generalities. In sharp contrast, I recall that "Introduction to Philosophy" was one of my two most favorite courses in college. The other one was "Physical Anthropology". Obviously, my tastes have changed with time. Perhaps early in life, we are sampling new ideas in a process to define ourselves. As we get older, we grow more content with who we are. Moreover, we realize that the time remaining in our lives is our most precious commodity. We no longer are willing to waste it.

Dennett and I might have been close friends, if we had ever shared ideas face-to-face. It seems that we both have been intrigued by the same intellectual pursuits. He has a lot to say about evolutionary theory and is a admirer of Richard Dawkins, as am I. He also has dabbled a bit in computer programming and is drawn to artificial intelligence. I wish he had been around when I was attempting to teach myself Assembly Language. He has elementary lessons in register programming in the book with more such material in the appendix. He discusses chess in the book, one of my lifelong enjoyments and an exercise for the mind in logical thinking ( as is computer programming). Robotics is yet another field for logical thinking and ties into our last common interest, namely, animal and human consciousness. Of course, Dennett and I have never met face-to-face, so reading his book has been an enjoyable, but one-sided experience. He is a much deeper thinker than I am, so the book has been educational for me.

The book consists of a series of different mind experiments, drawing mainly from the subject areas listed above. Dennett analyzes test concepts, which he calls "intuition pumps" for their value as tools in our future thinking. If you are skeptical of this approach, remember that Albert Einstein made many of his breakthrough using thinking experiments. Dennett's analyses amount to what he refers to as turning the dials on the intuition pump and seeing how it holds up. The latter chapters and their concepts are examined using the tools, he has taught us in the earlier chapters. Hopefully, I have described the book contents clearly enough for you to decide whether or not it would interest you. I enjoyed the book and hope that you do too.

Ralph D. Hermansen, June 23, 2013

I have to admit there are really good paragraphs in the book, but the author is a philosopher and keeps wandering around the chapter's central idea through the pages... And, between lines, asks the same unanswerable questions every philosopher has ever asked: Does God exists? Why are we here? blah, blah, blah. My point is: the author is not practical at all, just wanders around philosophical and byzantine-like questions that leaves the book's title senseless.

In an age where we are faced with a conglomeration of mental distractions, we all need to either upgrade our skills or develop new skills to help us focus and think more clearly. I also find that some of these tools go a long way to induce a sense of humor into our otherwise cranky default settings. Thank you Daniel C. Dennett. I expect to have this book handy for review....simply knowing its ideas and suggestions exist, helps. Wish it were possible to make this book mandatory reading in all high schools and college classrooms.

Another masterpiece from the pen of Dr. Dan. Clear and often humorous expositions of thinking aids and pitfalls covering the main outstanding issues in philosophy today. The chapter on free will alone is worth the price of the book.

Disappointingly dire. What sounds like a great topic is ruined by self-congratulation and endless trivial padding. Even after finding the actual points they were obvious rather than insightful. Also, patronizing: I lost count of how many sentences begin "We philosophers..."

Like others, I thought this was going to be general guide to thinking by a renowned philosopher. In reality, it's series of short essays on topics relating to evolution, consciousness, etc. The "intuition pumps" referred to in the title are really just thought experiments. Unlike actual experiments, these thought experiments may or may not actually prove anything. Actually, "thought experiments" would have been a more accurate title.

Daniel Dennet, like his theory of consciousness, is all about cerebral celebrity. From his origins as a philosopher in academic halls, he has become an intellectual public icon, attracting masses of curious thinkers to his speaking engagements. He writes crisply with large helpings of humor that bite just hard enough to dent the surface without offending too much. I mostly enjoy his style. It's entertaining. This book offers a group of critical thinking tools in the first part, and then a rehashing of Dennett's philosophical positions in the latter part. If you have read all of Dennett's past work, then there is little reason to read this book. As I have only read a small sample of his older work, I bought this book for a more complete picture of his thoughts.

I was jarred by his repetitive use of the so-called sorta "operator", a neologism that Dennet believes does explanatory work, but appears to function mostly as a smoke screen that hides the complexity of what he is trying to explain. To Dennett, when he places the word sorta in front of an object, action, or almost anything at all, it (the word sorta) meaningfully transforms that thing into something else. For example, there are monkeys, and then there are sorta monkeys. Sorta monkeys fall short of being monkeys in some way--they are different than monkeys--but Dennett demands that this difference, while actual, cannot be made rigorous. There is no systematic, logical dividing line between monkeys and sorta monkeys, yet somehow we all know the difference. Dennett is doing little more than appealing to a mysterious intuition (or capacity) when using sorta in front of words, and he attempts to hide this mysterian tendency by calling sorta an operator, trying to get us to confuse his fluffy sorta with the rigorously defined operators in mathematics and physics. The derivative d/dx is an operator; sorta is an expression in everyday speech that we use to create ambivalent meaning--I sorta like peanut butter ice cream, meaning, I don't really like it all that much but it's not bad but not great and I eat it sometimes. Dennett's use of sorta is sorta helpful in explaining things, but not really.

Dennett has obviously thought long about the various thought experiments he creates and criticizes, and I found his discussion about the Chinese room argument particular enlightening. Of course Dennett can be criticized for his uncritical use of metaphors as well. For instance, Dennett calls DNA a recipe for an organism. This metaphor is so common among philosophers and scientists that it is rarely questioned, but if we take Dennett's call to analyze metaphors, we find that this metaphor is weak. A recipe for making something tells the person following that recipe the precise ingredients and steps needed to create that something. My stripped-bass with homemade stuffing recipe tells me to fillet a 4-5lb bass, gather toasted wheat bread (crumbled), herbs, mushrooms, shallots, butter, wine, parmesan cheese, and to sauté these together, then layer the stuffing between the two fillets and place the stack in the oven for 45 minutes, and to occasionally marinate with the juices. It's delicious. Now, I can read DNA, and all I see are a sequence of nucleotides--it doesn't tell me to do anything. Even if I recognized the DNA strand as hippopotamus DNA, I still would not know how to make a hippopotamus by reading the DNA strand. Perhaps you say that is an unfair comparison; the full metaphor implies that DNA is a recipe to be read by other things in the cell and not intended for a person. Very well. DNA is transcribed into RNA by RNA polymerase, which produces a complementary RNA strand. DNA is not a recipe for the organism; it is a recipe, if anything, for RNA. And RNA is not a recipe for the organism, but a recipe for perhaps proteins or other cellular components. Proteins are not recipes for the organism, but rather serve particular functions within and between cells.

But suppose I could look at a DNA strand, and knew all of the proteins that are formed from that strand--would I then know the recipe for the organism? I couldn't just throw a bunch of proteins into a pot and expect it to become a living organism. DNA is not even sorta a recipe for an organism. Unlike a recipe that contains explicit instructions or directions in the form of actions--cut the fish, sauté the mushrooms, turn the oven to 400 degrees--DNA does not contain within its "code" any directions for putting an organism together. All of the action happens as a result of basic physical forces when DNA is in an appropriate environment. DNA, if anything like a recipe, is a partial list of constituents of an organism--think of the many vitamins and minerals that are necessary for the organism but must be ingested; these are not listed anywhere within DNA. We might say that DNA in a proper cellular environment is the cause of an organism. We might say that DNA can be used to identify types of organisms and individual organisms, like finger prints and foot prints. But to call DNA a recipe for the organism is a misleading metaphor.

Dennett spends a bit of the book trying to explain how the mind is created by matter, and more generally, how people are material machines like robots. The idea that humans are material machines was argued well by the French physician La Mettrie in his book L'homme Machine (Man, Machine) written in 1748, who said that the human body is a clock, a huge and complex finely designed clock. Dennett, like many today, believes a similair thing--that the mind is a computer, a huge and complex finely designed computer. Dennett explains the mind by appealing to a doctrine of cognitive gradualism--the idea that the mind can be gradually built up by considering individual neurons, then groups of neurons with varying functions, and gradually more complex functions on top of one another until we get something like the mind in all its glory. Marvin Minsky, one of the early pioneers of AI, told a similar and very readable story in his Society of the Mind, which was not mentioned by Dennett.

Dennett's materialism is not so interesting; what is interesting about Dennett is that he is a sorta materialist. He acknowledges the irreducibility of the "intentional stance", that we will always talk "as if" humans have beliefs and desires and so forth, even if we ever explain the mind physically. He thinks concepts like "the center of gravity" refer to real entities in a meaningful way that goes beyond matter at a particular location, and believes free will is an important and actual thing, even in a world ultimately made of matter in motion. I believe Dennett's sorta materialism saves his philosophy from being dogmatic and boring. He has been called a post-analytic philosopher, but I think he is more appropriately a sorta-analytic philosopher, a transition species between analytic philosophers and continental philosophers.

This is categorized with the Critical Thinking genre. Since the author continually violates its principles, I find it difficult to swallow.

Critical thinking is all about communication. Thinking with sound principles is how we get there. One of the first things is learning to understand what is told to us [either in writing or verbally]. Most statements usually are based on unspoken assumptions. "I can't drive from LA to Manilla. -- LA is Los Angeles; Manilla is in the Philippines; I am driving a car; my car does not work in the Pacific Ocean.

All the assumptions are correct in this example, but say someone does not know some of these assumptions. Or take, "God is dead." (That can create emotional responses.) For good communication to exist, it is vital that the hearer understand any unspoken assumptions. With an author it is vital that all assumptions are eliminated.

If I'm being clear, you understand when I say the author repeatedly makes statements using assumptions that cannot be substantiated with facts. He is standing on a foundation of sand explaining a subject he does not understand. To call his information "Tools," assumes all tools have a worthwhile function. It is like calling feces wallpaper paste. Giving something a name does not legitimize its use.

If you want someone's off the wall opinion, told with a little humor, this is for you. If you want to increase your knowledge get a dictionary or other source of proven knowledge. Don't waste your time.

With that further analysis seems unnecessary. 'nuff said?

I agree with the misleading title review. Very little "Intuition" and "Thinking" tools.
Mostly just what philosophers debate. And apparently philosophers like politicians use the ancient rhetorical techniques the Greeks and Romans documented on how to try to coax people of your position regardless of its correctness.

I've never written a book review for the store before but I feel I must say something about this horrible book. I've made it up to page 57, and perhaps it gets better, but I'm afraid I simply cannot continue for fear that he will drop yet another name of a famous person that he co-authored with or who he was able to trump at some academic conference. I'd be happy to learn from Professor Dennett, and I respect some of his other work, but I am not impressed by his retelling how he got the best of some Nobel Prize winner every other page or his explaining how stupid and slippery some famous academic is. He makes up names for arguments used by Stephen Jay Gould - Goulding. I'll call the style of discussion in this book Dennetting, argumentation by name dropping. If Professor Dennett actually had good ideas, he could explain them without the name dropping.

In addition, it is clear that he has science-envy because he constantly explains how important philosophers (his field) are compared to those silly scientists who think that they can do science without consulting philosophers. If he were secure in the contributions of his field he would not need to explain repeatedly how important it is.

Not recommended.

I have read through the preview and must say that the title is misleading. It is not about intuition at all, but about philosophy, psychology, and thinking tools! Perhaps it should be more aptly be titled as "Philosophy Pump : Thinking Tools"? Regards.

First philosophy book I have read outside of the classroom. A must read for anyone who likes to think and would like some other tools to do so. Multiple times during the book I would find myself saying "I never thought of it that way". Look forward to perusing the selection of other notable philosophers of my time.

Half tongue in cheek, half dead serious, entire details concept utility of reasoning strategies, The brilliant Danny Dennett runs over list of dozens of such argumentative modalities with great clarity.

It is not that philosophers are less smart than physicists. It is that philosophy is almost like physics but without the one thing that makes the huge difference, In physics, you will get a slap on your face whenever you make a mistake, and stick with it. Since people are wise but not rational, we do need this slap in the face in order not to make too many mistakes.
I would then expect a good philosopher to be careful enough to understand this limitation of philosophy, and to be careful not to fall into overconfidence. Yet, here I witness a huge problem, the most respected philosophers are the ones who have the most overconfidence. Exactly the opposite from what I should expect from a good philosopher. Daniel Dennett while a highly knowledgeable person, is one of those. The book is not about intuition pumps - his own term for "thought experiments". It is about the mind. He warns his readers not to fall into some traps but seem to fall to them himself.