[Marxism] Denis Dutton is dead

[Louis Proyect]

Chronicle of Higher Education
Denis Dutton, Founder of ‘Arts & Letters Daily,’ Dies

December 28, 2010, 11:14 am

Denis Dutton, founder and editor of Arts & Letters Daily and a professor 
of philosophy at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand, has died. 
Born in California, Mr. Dutton received his Ph.D. in philosophy from the 
University of California at Santa Barbara. He created Arts & Letters 
Daily in 1998. The Chronicle of Higher Education purchased the widely 
praised site in 2002.

“Denis was the creative force behind Arts & Letters Daily and wrote all 
the items on the page himself, even when he was on vacation,” said Phil 
Semas, president and editor in chief of The Chronicle. “He is nearly 
irreplaceable. Even so, we intend to continue Arts & Letters Daily in 
the spirit in which Denis created and nurtured it.”

Evan Goldstein of The Chronicle and Mr. Dutton’s longtime collaborator, 
Tran Huu Dung, a professor of economics at Wright State University, will 
continue to produce the site.

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I disliked Dutton intensely but am sad to hear of his passing. He 
launched the Bad Writing Contest in the 1990s as a way of shooting down 
postmodernist prose. At the time, I thought he was exceedingly clever 
but now realize that he was coming from a neoconservative/libertarian 
angle. He was quite close to the Furedi gang ideologically and was also 
a devout sociobiologist. Here's something I wrote on him a while back:

http://www.columbia.edu/~lnp3/mydocs/modernism/Denis_Dutton.htm