Hmm …

… About Aboutness | Issue 132 | Philosophy Now. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

It is no wonder then that aboutness, connecting subjects to and yet separating them from objects, is so vigorously contested by those like Dennett who want to incorporate humanity into a world defined by “the same physical principles, laws and raw materials that suffice to explain radioactivity, continental drift, photosynthesis, reproduction, nutrition and growth.” In such a world it would be impossible to see how human organisms could have stepped back sufficiently to see those physical principles, laws and raw materials that supposedly define the universe, and see also that they were subject to them; how we could place ‘matter’ in inverted commas and assert that we are made of it. If human beings were as entirely stitched into the causal net as tectonic plate movement and photosynthesis, we would be unable to understand how we could seem to manipulate it ever more effectively, or even entertain the illusion that we do so.