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
Mondine Garcia , was a French, Parisienne guitarist who specialized in playing traditional French gypsy jazz died he was 75.
The father of guitarists Ninine and Rocky Garcia, Mondine Garcia had a long, highly respected career in France as a notable part of the second generation of gypsy guitarists after Django Reinhardt. He often performed at the same venues and festivals alongside such contemporaries as Moreno Winterstein, Dorado Schmitt and Marcel Campion, and is succeeded by such "third generation" players as Angelo Debarre. His regular venue was La Chope Des Puces at Porte De Clignancourt in Rue Des Rosiers, Saint-Ouen.[2] One of his last festival appearances was at the Festival Jazz Muzette.[3]
