Quining Quine and Spinosizing Spinoza; reflections on Dennett and Tocqueville

I like to imagine that Dan Dennett started his celebrated (1988) "Quining qualia" as an attempt to publish a journal article in the manner of a comic, Borges story. (In fairness to my teacher, this was in the age before blogs!) How else to explain the erudite reference to Descartes in the first paragraph of the essay, and then the mock-ironic, scholarly…