The philosopher Daniel Dennett is fond of pointing out his resemblance to Charles Darwin. The comparison is somewhat apt. Like his double, Dennett has championed evolutionary theory and been a thorn in the side of organized religion. In a series of books on consciousness, evolution, religion, jokes, and other topics, he has spent the better part of the last fifty years marketing a bespoke version of social Darwinism by translating its main tenet — that adaptation leads to progress — into the imagery and rhetoric of Silicon Valley–era capitalism.

Dennett’s memoir published last fall, I’ve Been Thinking, includes the expected sketches of his childhood and adolescence. Born in Boston, he spent part of his childhood in Beirut, where his father, a Harvard-trained scholar of Islam, was stationed as a CIA agent before dying under mysterious circumstances in a plane crash in Ethiopia in 1947. The Dennetts returned to New England where Daniel eventually attended Phillips Exeter and Harvard University before doctoral study at Oxford. After a stint in England, he found work at the philosophy department at University of California Irvine when the campus first opened before settling at Tufts University for the majority of his career.

Dennett’s memoir is an uneven affair. It includes ruminations on mortality alongside allegations of bullying, which he levels against academic luminaries like the philosophers Jerry Fodor and John Searle as well as the left-wing biologist Stephen Jay Gould. Intermingled with this are trivial anecdotes about the best restaurants near conferences in far-flung locales, the cities he enjoys the most, and his infatuations with sailing and Cameron Diaz.