Fair point, but historically, there have been metaphysical accounts of matter that continue to exercise their influence on the sciences and scientists (sometime

Fair point, but historically, there have been metaphysical accounts of matter that continue to exercise their influence on the sciences and scientists (sometimes to their detriment). For example, Descartes defined material objects as extended things that are devoid of properties like color (which, for example, in physics are redefined in terms of things that are considered properties of matter, with what can't be accounted for in those terms relegated to the mind). Few physicists or biologists can explain to you what Cartesian metaphysics proposes, and few if any appeal to it in any explicit sense, but the legacy is insinuated in the modern scientific tradition, though it is not essential to science per se. This is the reason why scientists, perhaps biologists in particular, are uncomfortable or plainly hostile to the idea of teleology (though many of them misunderstand what it is by conflating it with intent). Teleology was in no way disproved historically by philosophers like Descartes, it was merely dismissed or relegated to immaterial minds. Materialism, as I have encountered it as a philosophical position, has been a position that takes Cartesian dualism and drops the immaterial mind from it, leaving us with only the Cartesian account of matter. This position has been shown to be unworkable because now it is impossible to account for all of those things that have been swept under the rug of the immaterial mind. That's why Dennett takes an eliminativist position that simply denies that those things we've been sweeping under the rug exist at all. It's a cop out move because it denies the existence of those things it cannot explain. The sounder move is to revise one's presuppositions. For this reason, I don't think these are really the best books on the subject, esp. for someone interested in getting a lay of the land and a rudimentary understanding of the subject matter. The best introductory book I've come across in this regard is E. Feser's "The Philosophy of Mind"[0]. [0] https://books.google.com/books/about/Philosophy_of_Mind.html?id=5uHbngEACAAJ https://books.google.com/books/about/Philosophy_of_Mind.html...