Back in 1994, Reason Editor in Chief Virginia Postrel surveyed the coming age of info-plenty and dubbed it " The Age of the Editor." More information, she argued, was going to drive the need for good editors-folks who could sift through the gush of material and deliver quality connections-through the roof. Only a dozen years on, it's hard to remember the excitement that such developments brought to those of us (read: all of us) who had been starved for content in ways that we didn't even understand. He had a great sense of the absurd too, which he displayed on a memorable Colbert Report appearance to discuss The Art Instinct.įounded in 1998, Arts & Letters Daily was one of the first great aggregator sites, pulling together reviews, essays, studies, op-eds, and more from a vast array of sources that had suddenly become available at the click of a mouse. Whenever Darwin and Dickens are mentioned in the same sentence-and they will be increasingly-Denis will be in the room in spirit. The growing interest in such truly interdisciplinary work owes a huge debt to his scholarship and support over the years. His 2009 book The Art Instinct: Beauty, Pleasure and Human Evolution, was his fullest and most extended argument along those lines. Born in California in 1944, he had a long and distinguished career as a philosophy professor at New Zealand's Canterbury University, whose faculty he joined in 1984.Īs the editor of the journal Philosophy and Literature, he castigated obscurantist prose among intellectuals and, more influentially, championed the use of insights from evolution in literary and cultural studies. Denis Dutton, the founder of Arts & Letters Daily and one of the first people to fully demonstrate the power of the World Wide Web as medium for serious intellectual exchange, has died.
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