Daniel C. Dennett, one of the most widely read and debated American philosophers, whose prolific works explored consciousness, free will, religion and evolutionary biology, died on Friday in Portland, Maine. He was 82.
His death, at Maine Medical Center, was caused by complications of interstitial lung disease, his wife, Susan Bell Dennett, said. He lived in Cape Elizabeth, Maine.
Mr. Dennett combined a wide range of knowledge with an easy, often playful writing style to reach a lay public, avoiding the impenetrable concepts and turgid prose of many other contemporary philosophers. Beyond his more than 20 books and scores of essays, his writings even made their way into the theater and onto the concert stage.
But Mr. Dennett, who never shirked controversy, often crossed swords with other famed scholars and thinkers.
Thought to myself, “so begins the loss of the horsemen” and then remembered we had already lost hitch…
Anyone following Dawkins on Twitter knows we also lost him a long time ago
WHAT??? We lost Dawkins? How do you figure that?
EDIT:
OK looking it up, I found that Richard Dawkins has made a tweet that can be considered transphobic, if you choose to misunderstand it. But in the end, Richard Dawkins respect the gender identity of trans people, which he has clearly stated. So calling him transphobic because he wants to be able to have a scholarly debate is exactly the zero tolerance attitude he was hoping to relax a bit, to make room for a more open scholarly debate, that at the moment is near impossible. Which was shown by the response to his tweet.
His mistake was maybe that he tried to use an analogy, that some disproportionately distorted to mean something I bet he never meant to imply.