A personal remembrance of Dan Dennett (1942-2024)
Back in the Fall of 2022, Dan Dennett and George Smith had a joint retirement party on the Tufts campus.* I was on research leave at Duke struggling with long covid. They both had let me know, ever so discretely, that they did not expect me to come up if travel was still too much for me, but that they knew the other would be very moved if I could. Dan was very good at making you feel special.
When I first met Dennett, I found him a gigantic bloviating and disappointing windbag who was fulminating against a man I had never heard of (Gould). I dropped his intro to philosophy class. It saddened me because when I had been admitted to Tufts in the Spring of 1989, D.C. Dennett was the only member on faculty whose name was familiar to me.
As a teenager somebody had gifted me Douglas Hofstadter’s Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, which I did not understand but found fascinating and read repeatedly. After devouring Metamagical Themas, I then bought The Mind's I: Fantasies and Reflections on Self and Soul with my newspaper route money at the Bruna at the little strip-mall on Buitenveldertselaan a few blocks from my mom’s house. (Bruna was a once ubiquitous middle-brow book and office-supply chain-store.) The Mind’s I was my first encounter with Dan and contemporary philosophy.
At Tufts, I drifted back into philosophy a few years later by meeting George E. Smith on the budget priorities (‘Peter-Paul’) committee. I became a George and, with contrasting style, Jody (Azzouni) groupie, and was fiercely loyal to Jeff McConnell—a campus critic of Dan’s. (In fact, on campus Steven White also was known of being critical of Dan.) At the time these were all in the departmental shadows of the ‘big three’ (Dan, Norman Daniels, and the shaper and glue of the department, Hugo Bedau). In my final year, I took a seminar with Dan on the manuscript of what would become Darwin’s Dangerous Ideas.
At Tufts these seminars were then often mixed upper-level bachelor and MA student affairs. The MA was incredibly prominent and so would attract really astonishingly good students. (I have a memory of a seminar dominated by exchanges between Dan and Michael Ridge, but it’s possible that is in a later year.) Dan’s teaching was inspired. He loved learning from his students, and he would bring in his critics to teach him how to improve his thinking. Anyway, I wrote a term paper on Dan’s account of Memes (one of my few ‘A’s in philosophy) and in his typed response he wrote something to the effect, ‘you seemed to be the only student who understood what I was up to with memes.’
Shortly thereafter, during graduation week, I received an invite to the ‘bottling party’—a department tradition at Dan’s home in Andover where the graduating majors would be feted and the department would close out the year in part by drinking Dan’s own cider. At some point, the buzz at the party died down and to my horror I saw the whole faculty surrounding Dan and my mom (then an advertising executive) in fierce debate over Heidegger. (My mom was rather tall herself, so it wasn’t like Dan was lording over her.) As I neared, I saw that they were thoroughly relaxed and enjoying themselves despite the surface heat. On the way back to Boston, I asked my mom how she knew so much about Heidegger and wasn’t fearless to take on Dan in philosophy in front of such a big crowd? She said that it was obvious to both Dan and her they both had been the only ones to have read the New York Review of Books. When a few weeks later I reported this back to Dan, his mischief was evident, ‘it takes a bull-shitter to recognize a bull-shitter.’
I went on a long road-trip with a fellow Tufts philosophy graduate; and after we parted ways, I ended up on Mykonos in the middle of Winter, love-sick and with despair. I picked up an old Olivetti in the local flee-market and started to write a long, convoluted essay on memes that I sent with airmail to Dan in Medford. In my accompanying letter I asked him if I should continue with philosophy. Every day I went to the post office in the port of Mykonos to await his response under the gaze of the local pelican. I have kept Dan’s long reply but it is a filing cabinet elsewhere. But I have re-read it a few times since. After expressing his concern over my break up, he came to the point: he liked my development of memetics, but that he was unsure I would be happy in analytic philosophy. I should look him up if I came back to Boston.
Only much later did I realize how extraordinarily generous Dan was with his time with students, sons of friends, and younger colleagues, and the infectious joy he experienced and would engender. Undoubtedly, he was trying to be the dad to many he never had himself. But I also don’t want to ignore the canniness in this. He also realized that we were all carriers of memes his narrative self cared about, and that this generosity would facilitate their spread. Once, in 2015, I spent a week with him in Girona, where with his big stick and lumbering gait he was a cross between Gandalf and Santa; we ate and drank a lot, and while listening to his stories about the profession and department politics I suddenly realized that he was an incredibly astute observer of other people’s frailties and needs. But I am running ahead of myself.
When I was deciding on graduate school, Dan nudged me toward Bill Wimsatt (he told me, ‘you will always learn something important in any conversation from him’). In fact, he spoke about Bill almost as reverentially as he did about Ruth Millikan (who he brought to campus when I was an undergrad). If you haven’t you should check out what he says about the Vicious Circle (on p. 209-210 of his autobiography, I Have Been Thinking). He also adored Kathleen Akins. I can’t speak for the woman in his life, but he was rare in his generation of championing women philosophers without reserve to the boys in the discipline.
Bill and I hit it off at once at Chicago during my campus visit, and after I started there we begun a reading group on Memetics with Betty van Meer (a PhD student in history of science and technology). We wanted to fine-tune memetics by looking at technological evolution (we read all of Henry Petroski’s case studies), and my idea was to develop a general science of memetics based on George Smith’s ideas on turning data into high quality evidence. I loved telling my dad (a fashion designer and wholesaler) how memetics would change our understanding of fashion cycles. By the end of the year, however, I was cured of memetics forever. The only remaining trace of my three year obsession with memes is a sweet acknowledgment by Bill in his very fine (1999), “Genes, Memes and Cultural Heredity.”
Bill asked me to TA for him in which we taught The Mind’s I in his ‘philosophy of mind and science fiction’ course, which I did a few years. The highlight of this course would be Bill’s acting out what it was like to be a bat. (One of Bill’s uncles had been the world’s foremost bat expert at Cornell decades before.) In Bill’s philosophy of biology seminar, we read Dan’s Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, and while I still admired it (then and now), I thought the polemics with Gould and Lewontin were overdone. I felt there was some red-bating in Dan’s account. When I wrote Dan this, he responded without indignation; he explained he felt he needed to draw attention to the mix of politics and science to explain their position to his readers. Much to Bill’s surprise I wrote a paper on the Nietzschean sources of Dan’s philosophy, and suggested Dan could not account for his own commitment to the truth. I sent it to Dan, who informed me that indeed he had devoured Nietzsche at Wesleyan and even owned a collected works.
Dan arranged for me to be invited to a conference in Canada in his honor. (I think this became the basis of one of Don Ross’ collections.) But my trip fell through because of lack of funding. He didn’t forget the paper because subsequently he sent me ‘postmodernism and truth’ and ‘faith in truth’ with sweet accompanying notes. Dan was great at making you feel you were in a long-running continuous conversation with him. By all accounts this should have been the end of my interactions with Dan because my own work took a sharp historical turn.
However, in the late 1990s I bumped into him at the APA. And he asked me about my dissertation. I told him that I was toying with the idea, as a kind offshoot of my main project, of showing how Adam Smith’s response to Hume parallels Quine’s response to Carnap. A few weeks later I received a stack of copies of Quine’s (1946) lecture notes on Hume. They were basically scribbled down on cards. Dan had mentioned my idea to Quine in their, I believe, weekly lunches at the American academy of arts and sciences (sometimes, it seems, Paul Samuelson would join them). And Quine had been persuaded to share the notes. The material had already been promised to James Buickerood (who published it later), so I never did anything with them.
A few years later, it must have been around 2001, he was at Northwestern for a debate with Dave Chalmers. I was nearing the end of my PhD, and not happy anymore in the department which had become very Wittgensteinian (in the therapeutic sense), and in which the graduate students were set against each other by an internal hierarchy. I went up with Bill to see it. After the debate — where Dan was in incredibly fine form —, Haugeland and I were both waiting to say ‘hi Dan.’ Dan’s eyes beamed, expressing joy in seeing us together. Sheepishly we had to inform him that we could not stand each other. Dan said, ‘we must change this’ and proposed, on the spot, that we should read the manuscript of what became Freedom Evolves together, and send him comments.
So one Summer, John and I read it and met weekly in order to discuss one chapter at a time, in the morning at the Bonjour Bakery at the end of my walk with my Bullmastif. Often Joan (a very fine philosopher in her own right) would stop by. Our only rule was John would defend Dan from my criticisms. Now, Elbow Room is probably the greatest work written by a trained analytic philosopher. (It’s not, of course, the greatest work in analytic philosophy.) I had devoured it in Glyfada, where that road-trip back in 1994 had stranded. And I still adore it. It blends science, humanism, erudition, and the best of analysis (including, I hasten to add, Wittgenstein).
I loathed the draft of Freedom Evolves—I disliked its militaristic tropes, its scientism, and thought it a simplified and vulgarized version of what was elegant and subtle in Elbow Room. It’s worth looking at p. 222 of Dan’s autobiography, I’ve Been Thinking, on his own view and reception of Elbow Room because it chimes with what he told me about his decision to write Freedom Evolves. (Perhaps there was also a big advance.) I don’t think John and I ever wrote up our detailed unease about the ms. Being forced to criticize cured me of a kind of lazy naturalism in my thinking. John and I concluded our reading group by reading Dan’s “Real Patterns” and John’s “Pattern and Being.”
Dan’s intervention in my life at Northwestern had some amazing consequences. While I remained marginal among the graduate students, John and Joan became mentors. John included me in lots of lovely activities, not the least a few hours long conversation on the philosophy of software engineering with Brian Cantwell on the quad (some of which also involved stories of Dan). In fact, I owe John the start of my career because he got me my first job the old-fashioned a way, a call to Joe Rouse at Wesleyan. This was my first lucky, academic break.
I then blew the second one a year later. Tufts was hiring at the entry level and invited me to an on campus interview. Delirious with good fortune I took a woman I had met the week before to Boston in my new Saab convertible, and we partied. Unsurprisingly, I gave an awful job talk. Academically, there is nothing worse than disappointing your former teachers. The whole crew looked at me aghast, also ashamed in front of their younger colleagues.
I was lucky to land a two-year post-doc at WashU. I was unhappy in that department. However, I started dating one of Dan’s favorite people, Cynthia Schossberger (a very fine philosopher who had also received a MA at Tufts, who was then on faculty at SIU-Edwardsville). Somehow Dan caught wind of it, and he informed me that she was way out of my league. I regret we didn’t take a selfie when the three of us re-united at the Fest in honor of George (May 2018).
After that, while I was at Syracuse and then moved to Leiden, I wouldn’t see or talk much with Dan for a few years, except an occasional drink at the APA. While Dan was generous and gentle, he loved me his polemics. Some of them quite acrimonious (not the least those with Creationists). I recall an especially bruising exchange with Jaegwon Kim at an APA. It wasn’t the first time where I thought, ‘the other has the better and more rigorous arguments, and yet Dan has shown his premises are built on quicksand.’ Much later I used this insight in my essay review of his (and Godfrey-Smith) that became Synthetic Philosophy. He sent me the ms. to Breaking the Spell, and my only contribution to Dan’s philosophical development was to suggest he read or reread Hume’s Natural History of Religion, which he saw as an anticipation of his own project. I wasn’t so sure. In contrast to Dan, Hume came to recognize that religion was ineliminable from our lives, and so one ought to make it conducive to social flourishing.
Dan was physically and philosophically a large man. He was genuinely interested in learning from others. He would be at his most joyous if he could see how someone else’s (say) conceptual or scientific breakthrough clarified a long standing puzzle of his and he would champion it subsequently. For example, he loved the Harvard theoretical biologist, David Haig’s Darwinian approach to meaning and he enlisted me in promoting it. David is himself a very careful reader of the history of biology and philosophy, and we often shared our discoveries with each other including Dan on cc.
Unlike many analytically trained philosophers, Dan had no contempt for book learning, and he loved assimilating good tricks from all corners of life. He could be among the most charitable readers of others, but once in polemic-mode he would not shy away from ridicule and satire. When his assistant, Teresa Salvato, wrote me he had passed away in his sleep, my second or third thought was, ‘What a wonderful life, but Tom Nagel will get the last word.’
Back in 2007, I had the opportunity to turn my post-doc into a permanent job in Leiden. During the interview, I was asked if I could teach ‘intro to philosophy of mind.’ I bluffed, and said yes. The following two years I taught it as a kind of history of classic papers from Turing to Kim. I wrote Dan for advice, and he urged me to look at Putnam’s brilliant papers from the early 60s on Machine and Robots. He confided that he was relieved that Putnam eventually bored with the topic and moved on. I think people familiar only with “The Meaning of "Meaning”” or late Putnam’s works will never quite understand the awe that people felt for Putnam in the profession.
The curriculum was probably a disaster for the students, but eye-opening to me. All the classic works in philosophy of mind in the 60s and 70s through the 80s are all over the map. It’s very hard to understand what the main point of any paper is (unless you are privy to an oral tradition) and since most of the participants knew each other, they often suppress premises or fail to explain common ground. It made me first alert to the fact that citation practices in analytic philosophy are not informative about the provenance of ideas.
In Leiden out of the blue, I received an email from the secretariat of Dutch science organization (NWO) whether I wanted to join in a lunch in Dennett’s honor. Wherever he went Dan would make sure his hosts would invite younger scholars. At the fancy restaurant, he proudly introduced me as his student to the most powerful people in the Dutch academy (which was then even more hierarchical than it is now). He repeatedly and charmingly insisted on drawing me into the conversation, especially when a senior scholar would drone on about their own work. A few years later, I got a similar invitation and came as close as I ever will be to the Dutch royal family during the festivities surrounding the Erasmus prize in 2012. During the last decade, I would meet Dan and his wife Susan often at such events, even if sometimes seated at one of the outer tables.
In 2010, Peter Ohlin and I hatched a plan for a volume on neglected classics in philosophy. We realized it needed to be anchored by some big names. So, I asked Dan. He immediate agreed to do it even though he didn’t have a topic. We went back and forth on some topics, including a work I knew he (somewhat surprisingly) admired, Jonathan Edwards’ Inquiry into the Modern Prevailing Notions of the Freedom of the Will which is Supposed to be Essential to Moral Agency. Eventually, I nudged him into doing Jonathan Bennett’s Rationality. (I had encountered it through Bill Wimsatt’s teaching.) Dan’s generosity and astuteness are on full display in his piece. When Jonathan Bennett read it, he wrote (6/5/13), “Dear Dan, I am overwhelmed. Your discussion of "Rationality" is careful, insightful, fair, and wonderfully generous. I thank you from the bottom of my heart. (And I'll bet that's the first time I have written that sentence to another philosopher.)”
In the Fall of 2011, my relationship with Dan changed. I was on sabbatical at UCSB, where my fiancée (now wife), Sarit, was doing research on the rejuvenation of Mueller cells in the retina after trauma. Our son was a toddler then in daycare on campus. One evening I wrote Dan in excitement about some of her research. He wrote back instantaneously. This puzzled me so I asked why he was up so late in Boston. He responded by saying he was in Santa Barbara. Turned out he was a visitor in the same building as she was.
After we arranged a baby-sitter, I went on my first ‘adult,’ double date with Dan and Susan in a lovely fancy restaurant downtown Santa Barbara. It was a memorable night because Sarit and Dan got into a pissing contest over neuroscience. My wife doesn’t drink, but Dan does. And after the discussion got more heated, I decided to nudge them into a different shared passion, sailing. Much to my bemused horror, the pissing context continued, and Sarit trumped Dan’s feats when she recounted her 19-day, Atlantic crossing. Dan insisted on driving us back to Goleta. I realized this was a mistake when their debate continued, and Dan, after seemingly missing the exit on the highway, and then made a frightening maneuver to catch the edge of the exit after all. Luckily this, too, could be turned in an amusing tale.
Dan and Susan would be invited with great regularity to Europe and London. We would have a quick lunch at the fromagerie in Marylebone. Once he was eager to tell me an anecdote. The night before at an event the moderator had posed him an objection by Eric Schliesser based on his blog Digressionsnimpressions. Dan said that he was delighted that others were also starting to read the blog of his student, Eric Schliesser, and that he was proud to be a contributor to it (back in 2014)! He knew I would love this story.
In May 2015, I was offered an all expenses paid trip, alongside Mario Santos-Sousa and Josefa ("Pepa") Toribio, to Girona by the Ferrater Mora Chair, where Dan presented the ideas that led to From Bacteria to Bach and Back. Our only task was to ask a question at the start of the Q&A after each lecture. We spent a week talking, eating, and hobbling around Girona. Dan was a foot taller than the average in Girona, so he was instantly recognizable throughout the town. We became minor celebrities as we discovered one brilliant little café after the other. Dan loved telling stories of his time in Athens, where he had tried to make a name of himself as a sculptor, his work with Ryle, and, of course, the Tufts department. I had lost interest in Dan’s work after Breaking the Spell, but the lecture series amazed me. Dan was not recycling but thinking afresh engaging with recent science, and developing his philosophy into new areas, including a still-under-appreciated template to think about social functions. Dan’s life-long engagement in continuous learning is a model worth emulating.
The week in Girona left a mark on me because it inspired my piece on Synthetic Philosophy, and an exchange back in 2018 (here) to which he responded, by making my point for me in a much more elegant way (here). Two weeks ago I sent him, Walter Veit, and Bryce Huebner, my restatement (in which I use some more Dennett). I knew something was amiss when he didn’t respond at once. Walter has wisely suggested I dedicate it to Dan.
I know this is already too long, but I have one other charming memory of Dan. In April of 2018 Allison Simmons and Jeff McDonough invited me to present at the Harvard history of philosophy workshop. I met Dan for lunch ahead of time, and as we walked across the Yard Harvard students would walk up to him to ask selfies. Dan’s relationship to Harvard was complex. He clearly loved the place, and he showed me where everyone’s offices, especially Quine’s, had been once. (Dan returned as visiting professor.) Dan didn’t feel the absence of PhD students in his life. He loved the postdocs that visited his Center at Tufts. But I wondered whether there was any hurt pride in not becoming permanent faculty there.
Anyway, my talk used his JPhil article on Descartes as part of my argument. During Q&A, while Dan, Jody, George were sitting at the other side of the room, Allison leaned over and said the ‘Tufts gang are beaming with pride.’ She was right, and it was an awesome moment. What happened next was surreal. Three-quarters through the Q&A Dan stood up to leave. (He had warned me he had some radio interview to head off to.) But then paused, and addressed me and the whole crowd. I was so flabbergasted I forgot what he said, but it was very kind. I remember thinking, if this would happen in a movie we would all say ‘oh, that’s Hollywood.’
I knew Dan was working on his memoirs because he shared material with me when I got interested in Paul Oppenheim (whose son stayed with Dan and Susan for a while). Dan sent me the chapter on George which I thought a lovely ode to their friendship.
At the retirement party for George and Dan, I didn’t speak publicly because I was afraid that with my long covid head I couldn’t due justice to the occasion. Dan himself was masked and very clearly unwell and winded. I was worried he would not have long to live.
But with his vitality he recovered and while his mobility had lessened, his spirited engagement with the world had not. On April 5, I received his last email from him. It was an unprompted response to my digression on affective altruism:
I have thought my “moral first aid kit, or what to till the Doctor of Philosophy arrives” puts paid to consequentialism as a usable framework. I like your emphasis on institutions and laws as the way to go. (I’ve enjoyed discomfiting some right wingers by saying that the problem with Africa is in large part ‘family values’—in the form of obligatory nepotism.) Keep up the good work!
Dan
I responded by recalling the influence of his Tanner lectures on my thinking. Dan’s generosity toward me was intellectual, professional, and personal. And I love that I share this gift with innumerable others many of whom much closer to him.
Dan would often repeat to me, even when you know that most (98%) of your readers are professional philosophers write as if your audience is an informed public. Because he wrote with verve on such important topics, I suspect a learned public will enjoy his wisdom for many ages to come.
Dan had a relentless optimism and curiosity. Once, around 2009, I was visiting Tufts and bumped into a visibly apprehensive Dan. He had just heard he needed heart surgery, and he was contemplating his mortality. A few weeks later, he recounted to me all the technical details of the latest medical technology that had saved his life.
When scholars will write about Dan’s philosophy they will point to Ryle and Quine. And obviously that makes sense. But for me Dan’s work is continuous with while reviving and deepening a mode of philosophizing of the post-Darwinian late nineteenth century that G.E. Moore and Frege thought they had killed off. Dan had very good scientific informants and worked hard to keep his philosophy scientifically up-to-date. He had the authority to question science when it was relying on to-be-discarded philosophy. But his was not a slavish or lazy naturalism; the point was, too, to turn intractable problems into empirical questions and to shape science into humane paths.
*This is a rather long In Memoriam for Dan Dennett. While it is an inevitable feature of the genre that it is more revealing of the author than of the subject matter, I hope this will also be of interest to those who want to get a sense of what he was like. I have been unable to crosscheck all the dates because I did not have access to the the typed correspondence with Dan; and I will correct any details later this year when I have access to my archive.