The New York Times Memorializes Daniel Dennett Without Reading Him
The Gray Lady's obituary of Dennett wasn't just wildly unfair. It got his basic philosophical commitments wrong.
Assume for the sake of argument that we live in a completely deterministic universe. Everything that ever happens—including, crucially, everything that happens inside human brains—is the only thing that could have happened given the total physical state of the universe at earlier times and the operation of cause-and-effect physical laws.
Compatibilism is…