Garry Wills, in a rather passionate review [of All Thngs Shining] in the New York Review of Books, has registered complaints about various points of scholarly detail in Dreyfus and Kelly’s exposition. This led to an exchange of published letters. Unfortunately, neither the review nor the letters illuminate the main issues that Dreyfus and Kelly are concerned with.
Robert M. Wallace
That depends on what you mean by “illuminate.” Wills argues that Dreyfus and Kelly repeatedly get their history, their facts, and their interpretations of texts wrong, “as if philosophy were a warrant for making false statements, over and over.” Wallace seems to be saying, as Dreyfus and Kelly seem so say in their reply to Wills, that none of that matters. That’s a really, really bad way of doing philosophy, it seems to me.