Denis Dutton
He was a sweet man with whom I'd exchanged e-mail after he'd linked to some of my pieces, and who I had the pleasure of meeting when Michael Shermer hosted his talk about his excellent book, The Art Instinct: Beauty, Pleasure, and Human Evolution, at the LA Public library.

Finally, here's the New York Times' Margalit Fox's obit on Dutton, who was also the founder of the wonderful Arts & Letters Daily:

Although philosophy has a mania for classification, Professor Dutton was demonstrably beyond category. His portfolio ranged over aesthetics (his major field of inquiry was the philosophy of art); evolution (his book "The Art Instinct," a Darwinian exploration published in 2009, commanded international attention); editing (he founded and edited the journal Philosophy and Literature); obfuscatory prose (he was a publicly sworn foe of same, and ran a competition to honor the worst offenders); plagiarism (as a cultural phenomenon; he was not himself a practitioner); and sitar playing (this he did practice).

He wrote widely in the mainstream press, and his opinions were solicited by the news media on subjects from moles' noses ("No one would find the star-nosed mole ugly if its star were iridescent blue," he told The New York Times in August) to the essential difference between plagiarism and forgery (in the first, one passes off another's work as one's own; in the second, vice versa).

He died of prostate cancer, but he lived vigorously, and will be missed by millions.