Remembering Dan Dennett

This Sunday, on the second anniversary of his passing, we’ll be rebroadcasting the special retrospective we produced in tribute to Dan Dennett shortly after he died in 2024. I don’t have much to add to what Josh, Ray, and their guest Jenann Ismael had to say in that episode as they listened back to Dennett’s past appearances on the program with John and Ken. But his last appearance was a memorable one for me.

That episode was recorded live at Pacific University in Forest Grove, Oregon as part of their annual Undergraduate Philosophy Conference in 2015. We’d been invited to put on a show at the conference going back several years. In 2009 we combined the trip to Oregon with another invitation from OSU in Corvallis, and in 2011 we added a live broadcast from the studios of OPB in Portland to make it an honest-to-god three-date tour—though it was only the following year, with a show at Lewis & Clark College in Portland (but no OPB), that we promoted it as such, with t-shirts and what not. For this 2015 tour we returned to OPB for another live broadcast in addition to the usual events in Corvallis and Forest Grove. Sadly, as of this writing, that would be our last time performing at OSU and Pacific University, as our faculty contacts/advocates at each of those schools retired shortly thereafter.

Fortunately the Pacific episode with Dennett was a banger. The Tom Miles Theater was a true performance space, filled to capacity with the enthusiastic conference attendees. And it was filmed for posterity—enjoy.