Can't say I met or knew him, but his essays in "The Mind's I" and "Brainstorms" are what got me to pursue tech as a teenager in the early 90s. Along with Hofstader, his ideas were foundational to hacker culture. What a time to go, where there has been a kind of cog.sci winter for the last 20 years, but the last year of LLMs has forced philosophy of mind back into the public consciousness. Though largely today under the guise of "AI Safety" and "alignment," Dennet's articulations form the tools we're going to be using to reason about ethics as they relate to these things we think of as minds - and regarding how we relate to these things that increasingly resemble other minds. Without too much lionizing (even though he has, however, just died), it would be hard to say that new ideas in philosophy as a whole have had more impact in a lifetime or more than that.
A lot of very clever people disagreed strongly with him. However, since not one of them could deny they were shaped by the forces they opposed, those controversies became the shape of his own huge and formidable influence. I'm sure he would want to be remembered for something else, and I have the sense sentimentality was not his thing at all, but his popularization the term "deepity," was in the character of many of his ideas, where once you had been exposed to one, it yielded a perspective you could afterwards not unsee.
I hope an afterlife may provide some of the surprise and delight he brought to so many in this one.
A lot of very clever people disagreed strongly with him. However, since not one of them could deny they were shaped by the forces they opposed, those controversies became the shape of his own huge and formidable influence. I'm sure he would want to be remembered for something else, and I have the sense sentimentality was not his thing at all, but his popularization the term "deepity," was in the character of many of his ideas, where once you had been exposed to one, it yielded a perspective you could afterwards not unsee.
I hope an afterlife may provide some of the surprise and delight he brought to so many in this one.