Denis Dutton was an academic, web entrepreneur and libertarian media commentator/activist. He was a professor of philosophy at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand died from prostate cancer he was , 66. He was also a co-founder and co-editor of the websites Arts & Letters Daily, ClimateDebateDaily.com and cybereditions.com.[1]
Dutton was from Los Angeles, California, specifically the San Fernando Valley, where his parents owned a bookstore;[2] he was educated at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He taught at several American universities, including the University of California, Santa Barbara and the University of Michigan–Dearborn, before emigrating to New Zealand. From 2008 to 2010 he was the Head of the Philosophy school in an unofficial capacity at Canterbury and, when Professor Copeland, Head of the School[3], was quarantined because of influenza in 2009, Dutton acted briefly as Head of Humanities.
He was one of the founding members and first chair of New Zealand Skeptics.
(9 February 1944 – 28 December 2010)Art appreciation theory |
Dutton's 2009 book The Art Instinct: Beauty, Pleasure, and Human Evolution[4] opposes the commonly held modernist view that art appreciation is culturally learned, claiming instead that art appreciation stems from evolutionary adaptions made during the Pleistocene.[5] He set out an abbreviated version of his theory in a 2009 Google Talk lecture.[6]Criticism of academic prose
Dutton used his editorship of the journal Philosophy and Literature to criticise many literary and cultural theorists for a writing style that is, "no better than adequate -- or just plain awful."[7] In 1995, his Bad Writing Contest criticised the prose of Homi K. Bhabha and Fredric Jameson.[8] In 1998, the contest awarded first place to University of California-Berkeley Professor Judith Butler, for a sentence which appeared in the journal diacritics:The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power.Dutton said, "To ask what this means is to miss the point. This sentence beats readers into submission and instructs them that they are in the presence of a great and deep mind. Actual communication has nothing to do with it."[7] Butler challenged the charges of academic pedantry and obscurantism in the pages of the New York Times[9] and the affair briefly became a cause célèbre in the world of academic theorists. Dutton then ended the contest.
Public radio advocacy
Dutton was a passionate supporter of public radio. In the early 1990s he founded the lobby group The New Zealand Friends of Public Broadcasting in response to proposals to devolve New Zealand's two non-commercial public radio stations.[10]In 1995 he was appointed to the board of directors of Radio New Zealand, where he served for seven years.[11] After concluding his term as a director, Dr Dutton and Dr John Isles issued a report criticising Radio New Zealand for loss of neutrality in news and current affairs, failure to adhere to charter and opposed to contestable funding of broadcasting.[12]
Recent academic contributions
In 2010, Dutton introduced a course entitled “Darwin’s Dangerous Idea” [13](Phil220) The title was borrowed, with permission, from the title of a book by philosopher Daniel Dennett, the man who famously called Darwin's formulation of evolution "The single best idea anyone has ever had." One of the purposes of the course was to demonstrate why Dennett's claim is defensible.The required anchor text for the course was The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution, by Richard Dawkins, an evolutionary theorist. Writings by Charles Darwin were sourced from another recommended text, Darwin's On the Origin of Species, edited by Joseph Carroll. Carroll's collection included important excerpts from The Voyage of the Beagle and The Descent of Man, as well as historical background (including Darwin's own short autobiography) and source material on other evolutionary thinkers.
Dutton intended this course to be a thought-provoking journey through the making of The Origin of Species, highlighting not only his personal journey but also the obstacles that thwarted early understanding of evolutionary theory.
Because of Dutton's death, this course will not be offered again. Douglas Campbell will staff one of Dutton's entry level courses, Philosophy 110"Science Good, Bad and Bogus," as mentioned above. Campbell founded with Dutton, and at present edits, Climate Debate Daily; However, the remainder of Dutton's Courses are likely to be cancelled indefinitely [14]
Death
In his final Email to his students in Philosophy 110, he wrote that the shoulder pain he had been suffering from was in fact cancer, and that he had recently begun a non-alternative treatment which left him feeling much better. He continued to decline, however, so that in his last lecture of 2010 he announced to his Philosophy 220 students his reluctant retirement from university teaching. Without ceremony, he thus slipped out the door of the university where he had lectured since 1984. Other students did not know of his retirement until they received a memo acknowledging the cancellation or restructuring of the courses he had been teaching. At its December 2010 graduation ceremony, the University of Canterbury awarded him a Research Medal for his work,[15] barely a fortnight before his death from cancer on 28 December 2010.[16][17]To see more of who died in 2010 click here
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