I'm glad you like his style! I find him incredibly approachable and clear for some of the reasons you outlined above. He also take great pains to be a clear communicator, which you can see in pieces of media like his appearance on Sean Carroll's podcast: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V0evRaWV_HU
Anyway, I was not a philosophy undergraduate and so a lot of my exposure was either to popular level works (surveys, etc), or big historical names (Descartes, Hume, Plato), or to very specific areas of research (I was big into metaphysics and philosophy of mind "realists", like Chalmers, Searle, Flanagan etc), and skepticism about intuition, or sense-data, or even skepticism about a priori truths had just never really occurred to me. That's more of a self-own than anything, but we first-years in grad school had a course together where someone in the dept. would take us thru a deep dive in a very specific area by way of a brand new book. For example, the year prior to my arrival they read thru a "Climbing the Mountain", an early draft of the book that would eventually become Parfit's "On What Matters".
Anyway, my year all picked "Describing Inner Experience", and this would become my introduction to an ultimately useful view that opened the world of CogSci to me since assumptions I had (which can probably be described at Cartesian) no longer posed powerful arguments against a more empirically-minded look into how the mind works. So, folks that I previously disregarded like Dennett, Wittgenstein, the Churchlands, were now gateways into Smolensky, Prinz, Carruthers, etc.
Anyway, I was not a philosophy undergraduate and so a lot of my exposure was either to popular level works (surveys, etc), or big historical names (Descartes, Hume, Plato), or to very specific areas of research (I was big into metaphysics and philosophy of mind "realists", like Chalmers, Searle, Flanagan etc), and skepticism about intuition, or sense-data, or even skepticism about a priori truths had just never really occurred to me. That's more of a self-own than anything, but we first-years in grad school had a course together where someone in the dept. would take us thru a deep dive in a very specific area by way of a brand new book. For example, the year prior to my arrival they read thru a "Climbing the Mountain", an early draft of the book that would eventually become Parfit's "On What Matters".
Anyway, my year all picked "Describing Inner Experience", and this would become my introduction to an ultimately useful view that opened the world of CogSci to me since assumptions I had (which can probably be described at Cartesian) no longer posed powerful arguments against a more empirically-minded look into how the mind works. So, folks that I previously disregarded like Dennett, Wittgenstein, the Churchlands, were now gateways into Smolensky, Prinz, Carruthers, etc.