Radboud University will have four more honorary doctors in October. Daniel Dennett, the ‘greatest living philosopher of our time,’ is one of them. Writer Jeroen Brouwers is another.

‘The greatest living philosopher of our time’ – that’s how Marc Slors, Professor of Cognitive Philosophy, described the American Daniel Dennett on voxweb in 2016. Dennett will receive an honorary doctorate from Radboud University in October.

When the 75-year-old philosopher came to Nijmegen two years ago to give an address at De Vereeniging, the concert hall was sold out. He’s extremely popular among students. ‘He writes amazingly well and is a great storyteller,’ said Slors at the time. Daniel Dennett is Professor of Philosophy at Tufts University in Boston. He has written fourteen influential books on such topics as the mind-body problem, consciousness, free will, artificial intelligence, the theory of evolution, and religion. He is controversial in his home country, where he is dismissed as a radical atheist and Darwin fundamentalist. That fact that he is being awarded an honorary doctorate from a university with a Catholic stamp is remarkable.

Dennett is enjoying great popularity in Europe as brain research continues to reveal how our behaviour is the product of our brains. This is not to say that the human mind can be reduced to the brain, Dennett believes, unlike Dutch brain researchers such as Dick Swaab and Victor Lamme, who claim that we are at the mercy of our brains and there is no such thing as free will.

Jeroen Brouwers

The Dutch writer Jeroen Brouwers (77) will also come to Nijmegen in October to receive an honorary doctorate. Jos Joosten, Professor of Dutch literature, said about him in a press release: ‘Brouwers is a prominent and acclaimed writer with a career that spans more than half a century.’

‘Brouwers has addressed important social issues in his novels: Bezonken Rood (Sunken Red) (1981) deals with the Dutch East Indies during the Second World War, while Het Hout (The Wood) (2014) examines abuse in the Catholic Church. But he is also a great essayist and polemicist with an approach that treads the middle ground between scientific analysis and literary imagination. He lives for and through literature and is an example to many writers.’

In 2015 Brouwers won the ECI Literature Prize, worth €50,000, for his novel Het Hout. In 2007 he had refused the Dutch Literature Prize, the highest accolade for an author in the Dutch-speaking world, because he considered the prize money of €16,000 to be an insult.