***

The summer of 2019 was a busy, blissful blur. I reunited with my wife, Amelia, after an academic year apart; we were expecting our first child; we adopted a dog; we were both preparing to begin new jobs; we bought our first house in a new city, nestled among West Virginia hills and woods that we were keen to explore. I felt like everything was working out—like life was fundamentally good. Riding that high, I set up my fresh university-issued Outlook account and cold-emailed the greatest living philosopher.

***

I had read The Mind's I as a teenager, and then Consciousness Explained, Elbow Room, and The Intentional Stance in college (I think in that order). During my M.A., I read a further handful of Dennett's essays for courses on animal cognition research, Donald Davidson, and the self. After that, if I remember correctly, I didn't think about Dennett much at all through two-and-a-half years of Ph.D. coursework.

Then Gary Hatfield (my dissertation supervisor-to-be) taught a seminar on the metaphysics of perceptual qualities, including his own relationalist view of color. According to relationalism, colors aren't intrinsic physical properties of colored objects; nor are they illusory figments of our conscious experience. Rather, colors are properties that objects have in relation to organisms who can experience them as colored. This kind of relational property is perfectly real, objective (to study it, you simply have to study both objects and perceivers), and unmysterious: as unmysterious as foodstuffs being nutritious only in relation to creatures who can digest them. Reading Hatfield’s argument for relationalism while sitting in my room in a rowhouse in West Philly, I had what struck me as a revelation, and immediately ran downstairs to the kitchen to ask Jordan Taylor, my housemate and fellow Hatfield grad student, to stop doing whatever he was doing and tell me whether I was onto something. What if beliefs and love and arrogance and intelligence were like colors? Neither intrinsic properties of people's minds nor illusory figments of our social cognitive practices, but properties that people have in relation to organisms who can understand them as arrogant believers or intelligent lovers. This felt like a wholly original insight for the eighty seconds it took me to find Jordan and explain the idea to him, at which point he said "oh yeah, like Dennett?"

When it sunk in how similar my nascent view was to Dennett's famous intentional systems theory, I dedicated myself to reading everything he had written on the topic—and in time everything he had written, period—mainly in order to articulate where and how I disagreed with him. I wasn't seeking inspiration or edification. I was seeking to distinguish myself: to show that I wasn't just another Dennett acolyte, that I was taking Rylean insights in an importantly different, novel direction. Despite myself, the more I read the more inspired and edified I became. My initial "insight" was almost certainly subconsciously informed by my having already read some Dennett (and Davidson). Regardless, my developed view has been shaped and enriched by immersion in his oeuvre. And I eventually came around to being proud to say that we were traveling in roughly the same direction.

I also found myself appreciating the aspects of Dennett's philosophy I continued to disagree with—such as his commitment to a (purportedly naturalistically acceptable) variety of natural teleology—as I developed a more thorough understanding of his synoptic vision. (Dan was self-consciously pursuing the philosophical project that Wilfrid Sellars prescribed in "Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man": he hoped to help fuse the manifest and scientific images of man-in-the-world.) I discovered that his thinking was almost always subtler and more creative than his critics, myself included, realized.

***

The contract I signed with WVU in 2019 included some money for visiting a mentor at another university. When I emailed Dan about being my mentor, I wasn't aware of his reputation for extraordinary generosity towards junior scholars. (See Quill Kukla's wonderful story.) I had never met him, and never corresponded with him. I was confident that he would politely decline to meet with me if he responded to my email at all. Maybe he'd skim one of the papers that I'd attached to the email. That would be pretty cool. Then I'd email somebody else—probably somebody I had met before!—and life would go on.

Needless to say, I instead received extraordinary generosity. Dan wrote back to say that he had enjoyed my papers, and invited me to visit him at his home in Maine. He would be recovering from hip surgery in the fall, and would appreciate philosophical company. From the start, he took me and our mentor-mentee relationship seriously, instructing me to read four recent books—Ruth Millikan's Beyond Concepts, Nicholas Shea's Representation in Cognitive Science, Daniel Dor's The Instruction of Imagination, and Simona Ginsburg and Eva Jablonka’s monumental The Evolution of the Sensitive Soul—and an article—David Chalmers's "The Meta-Problem of Consciousness"—before we met. I devoured this informal syllabus (while attempting to master my own syllabi as a first-semester professor) over the course of August and September, and flew to Maine for a long weekend in October (a month before my daughter was due to be born). What followed were three intense, lovely days. Dan and I talked—with occasional changes of scenery, but no real interruptions to conversation—from breakfast until dinner. We talked mostly about philosophy, plus a good bit about how to navigate academic life, and a good bit about parenthood. Dan’s wife, Susan, took us out to dinner at a strip mall Indian restaurant and thanked me for keeping Dan entertained for the weekend. I mentioned my enthusiasm for board and card games, and I could see Dan get his hopes up that I might prove a worthy opponent. Later that night, he kicked my ass at frigate bird.

My self-interested goals for the weekend were to avoid making a fool of myself (alas, frigate bird), to impress Dan with my readings of and reactions to his syllabus, and to press Dan on our points of disagreement. This last goal felt most crucial; I nervously rehearsed lines of criticism on the flight to Maine. I wanted to show Dan Dennett why he wasn't quite right about the role of predictability in the metaphysics of belief, why he should embrace the idea that intersubjective indeterminacy about what people believe is of practical (and not just theoretical) significance, why he shouldn't be so optimistic about a teleofunctional/interpretivist theory of intentionality, and more. But my critiques ended up forming a very small part of our conversations. In each case, he effortlessly saw what I was saying, graciously accepted my interpretation of his views, eloquently rephrased and acknowledged the force of my criticisms, and warmly encouraged me to develop my insights. In a memorial blogpost, Eric Schwitzgebel describes Dan's flexible attitude towards junior scholars' divergent interpretations of his views. My experience of this attitude, which Eric rightly categorizes as a species of "philosophical generosity", was somewhat frustrating. Dan seemed slippery, difficult to pin down. He would express agreement with me in conversation (and, later, in correspondence), in a way that evinced a clear understanding of what I was trying to say, but then he would go on to write something that seemed to disregard the critique I thought he had taken to heart.

In these moments of frustration, I was missing the point. I wanted, still, to contrast my views with Dan’s, to distinguish myself. He preferred to shrug away quibbles—without being dismissive—and to focus on doing philosophy together. As with so much in Dan's life, this preference fit nicely with his still-evolving synoptic vision of human nature and human inquiry. In talks given over the last couple years, Dan stressed the importance of sociality, for the phylogeny and ontogeny of cognitive systems—humans have minds like ours because they have been shaped by social forces—but also, especially, for our ability as inquirers to discern truths about the world—we can trust our own brains insofar (and only insofar) as our thinking is affirmed (and scaffolded) by others. Dan had no interest in "mentoring" me by telling me what to think. Nor, of course, did he want me to tell him what to think. Instead, with levels of sincerity and affability I aspire to emulate, he wanted to think together with me. The point of the syllabus wasn't that he thought there were things I needed to know. Nor was it to test my ingenuity in reading and reacting to difficult philosophy. The point was to provide fodder for us to think through—hopefully to think beyond—together.

I ended up writing a few essays that grew directly out of our conversations that weekend. Those conversations wouldn't have gone the places they went, and those essays couldn't have been written, if we had spent the weekend talking about our disagreements instead of exploring new terrain together.

***

Dan and I stayed in touch. We corresponded about philosophy over email. I sent him a copy of the parlor game Codenames, which he reported playing with his family to "mindbending" effect. He sent me a touching note when my first daughter was born in 2019, and another when my second daughter was born in 2022. Right around when Rudy Gobert was rubbing his COVID-ridden hands on his teammates, we were starting to make a plan for Dan to visit West Virginia. The pandemic led to Dan's visit being postponed, and then postponed again. I worried it wouldn't happen. In the fall of 2022, an essay I had written appeared in a public-facing magazine. I was anxious about the piece, since the editor had decided to cut the section that I thought contained the heart of my argument. Dan, who didn't know about the essay (or my anxiety), stumbled across it on the web and sent me what is, without exaggeration, the kindest and most flattering message I've ever received about my work.

A few months later, in February of 2023, he got me invited to a workshop he was leading for Johns Hopkins's inaugural Natural Philosophy Forum. The day after the workshop, I drove him from Baltimore to Morgantown while we talked about a couple of new projects I was working on. That drive kicked off another three-day stint of intensive one-on-one conversations, this time punctuated by a guest lecture for my Philosophy of Science class (where Dan listened to my undergrads with the same attentiveness and collaborative spirit as he had always listened to me) and a public lecture for the university community. He met Amelia and my daughters, entertaining us over dinner with stories from his just-completed memoir. Later that night, after I'd dropped Dan off at his hotel, Amelia said that she'd never met somebody who managed to be quite so full of himself without coming off as a narcissist or an asshole. "He knows that he's a big deal, and he feels great about it, but in a charming way where he makes you feel great about it too." Just so.

Here are the remarks I gave before Dan's public lecture:

It's my great pleasure to introduce today's speaker, Dr. Daniel C. Dennett, who just as of last month is a Professor Emeritus at Tufts University. Dan is, in my view, the most important philosopher of his generation. And this isn’t exactly a hipster pick; his work has been widely celebrated inside and outside of the academy. In lieu of reciting the long list of honors on his CV, I’d like to say a few things about what I think makes Dan's work so special.

One thing that distinguishes Dan from many philosophers is his dogged pursuit of answers to “how” questions, and not just “why” questions. It’s not that Dan isn’t interested in answering philosophy’s deep and venerable “why” questions; rather, he is convinced that once we have answered the relevant “how” questions in sufficient detail, we'll also, thereby, have answered the “why” questions. And he rightly insists that there are no shortcuts, no fancy logical footwork, no thought experiments purporting to demonstrate inconceivability via unimaginability, that can deliver philosophically satisfying answers. Only slow, careful, empirically informed and conceptually creative progress on “how” questions will do the trick.

This commitment to addressing “how” questions pushed Dan to do genuinely, deeply transdisciplinary work, embedding himself in the labs of researchers across the life and mind sciences, long before interdisciplinarity was fashionable. In this way I think he's been a model for all of us who strive to live the life of the mind—both in his respect for the many varieties of expertise across the academy and in his ability to see beyond disciplinary fashions and boundaries.

On the last morning of his visit, Dan and I took a drive into the mountains and talked about animal minds. Later, over brunch, I pressed him to tell me every story about Gilbert Ryle that he could remember. Then I drove him to the airport, grabbed his bag out of the back of my minivan, walked him to his gate (it's a tiny airport), shook his hand, thanked him for everything, and said "see you later."

***

In the year since he visited West Virginia, Dan and I kept up our correspondence. He put me in touch with other scholars with whom he thought I should be talking, and congratulated me on the acceptance of a journal article. We exchanged reading recommendations. I sent him G.A. Cohen's impression of Ryle; he responded that it was pretty good but that he "could do better if I put my mind to it, but I have too much on my plate to devote time to such a pleasant project. Later, maybe." We exchanged holiday greetings and news of our (grand)kids. He listened to the new record by my brother's band. We chatted about basketball. (Dan was a dedicated Celtics fan, though, last we discussed the matter, he hadn't forgiven Brad Stevens for trading Marcus Smart.) In a New Year’s note, he told me that 2023 was tough, but that he was hoping he was on the mend. The last words he wrote to me, about a month ago, were "carry on!"

We were friends, but we weren't close. Dan had dozens of relationships like the one he had with me, dozens closer. I'm sure he recently encouraged lots of friends, mentees, and acquaintances to carry on. It's a stock signoff. But it won't stop coming to mind, or bringing tears with it.

A couple weeks ago, my four-year-old asked me if my friend Dan was going to visit again soon. "The one with the beard?", she clarified. (She knows the world is replete with Dans, some much more interesting than others.) I said I hoped so. She said she hoped so too. I'm grateful to have books I can give her when she's older, to help us remember him. To keep his voice in our ontology.