Brian Leiter has reported the passing of Fred Dretske; Brian also links to this gem on the Gettier paper. I met Dretske only a few times in graduate school and spent a few days with him when he visited Syracuse. (Chalmers has some nice pictures, including one of Dretske and Murat Aydede, who enthusiastically introduced me to Dretske's views in graduate school.) I recall a memorable exchange between Alva Noë and Dretske, where from the audience (I think) Dretske forcefully pressed his case against the embodied cognition approach.
Dretske got his PhD (1960) at age 28 at a very good (but not great) department (Minnesota--then in the grip of logical positivism, I suspect). Unlike a lot of twentieth century, analytic boy-wonders, he did not have a break-out (still famous) paper at the start of his career. (Correct me if I am wrong.) Rather, he published on a very regular basis in top journals on a range (of sometimes very quirky) topics, including time-travel--this morning I enjoyed reading "Counting to Infinity," which reminds us of that alternative world in which analytic metaphysics could have come in its own by reflection on the nature of infinity (recall my post). After a decade (or so), he published Seeing and Knowing and a remarkable group of papers, including a classic one on Epistemic Operators.
Between Knowledge and the Flow of Information (1981) and Naturalizing the Mind (presented in 1994) he seemed to capture and define the common sense of a whole philosophical era. A remarkable achievement.
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