Special tribute: Dan Dennett
The philosopher who argued about mind and evolution
A couple of days ago Dan Dennett passed away. He was one of the most influential philosophers of the 20th and early 21st century, an original thinker, and certainly someone who didn’t shy from controversy.
I met Dan many years ago, and though we didn’t necessarily see eye to eye on evolution (he was a harsh critic of evolutionary biology Stephen Jay Gould, I wasn’t), he was never anything but kind to me. Indeed, he agreed to write one of the letters of support that got me my first job as a philosopher at the City University of New York, thus allowing me to complete the switch from biology to philosophy that I had began a few years earlier.
One of my best memories of him is from a long evening we spent together (and with physicist Lawrence Krauss) in Ghent, Belgium, on 17 October 2013. The event was organized by my friend Maarten Boudry, with whom I co-authored a number of technical papers and co-edited two books.
At dinner before the event Dan had been very pleasant to the rest of us, behaving like a benign uncle. The event itself promised to be highly informative and entertaining.
As you can see from the video (below) the stage was set with a lot of alcohol available to the panelists. The result…
