Dan Dennett died on April 19 of this year. He was a great philosopher, as many know, and a very good man, as fewer will know. Three decades ago, a few years after his 1991at Tufts University had a master's degree program. I had always wanted to get a degree in philosophy, but the timing never worked with my medical and psychiatry training.
They say that writing style reflects the man, but in his case, there was a certain disconnect. Those who read him find an author who is very direct and self assured, but if you disagree with him, perhaps irritating. In person, he remained direct and self assured, but also quite open minded, flexible, and curious in what others think. He clearly was extremely intelligent but unlike many people who use their.
He had no pretense. He had trained and prestigious places like Cambridge in the UK, and he could have easily worked anywhere he wanted, but he stayed at Tufts for half a century. He always said that Tufts was a great place to. It wasn't a place where a professor supervised dozens of graduate students, taking credit for the work of others. It was a place where the professor did philosophy himself, and we students had the joy of watching him actually do it.