This is so sad. I invited Dale to our seminar at LSE last February. We had a wonderful day. He was amazing both as a philosopher and a person.

He will be missed. Sending all my sympathy to his closest people.

This is terrible. I was lucky enough to have professor Dorsey on my dissertation committee; in addition to being a brilliant philosopher, he was generous with his time and help. He also struck me as very witty and a fun guy to be around.

I really can’t adequately express what a loss this is. Although I did not know Dale that well personally (certainly not as well as I wish I had) his teaching and his work have influenced my life as much as any other philosopher.
I was in my final year of undergrad at the University of Alberta during his time there, and was lucky enough to take Dale’s seminar on “Well-Being and the Good’. It made an immense impact on me, as evinced by the fact that I ended up writing my dissertation on the philosophy of well-being. The reading list for that course (the textbooks included Sidgwick’s The Methods of Ethics, Hurka’s Perfectionism, Feldman’s Pleasure and the Good Life, Raz’s The Morality of Freedom, and Griffin’s Well-Being) has formed a core part of my philosophical library ever since.And of course, Dale’s own work has also been an endless source of ideas/inspiration for myself and so many others working on well-being and related topics.
I wish that I had been less in awe of Dale personally, since my shyness prevented me from reaching out and adequately conveying my debt to him, or getting to know him better on a personal level. Nonetheless (although sadly he may never have known this) he is the first person I thanked in my dissertations acknowledgment’s section.
I am grateful that I had the opportunity to community to Dale a little of what he meant to me a couple of years ago. This gets to another aspect of Dale’s life and career that deserves to be widely known. For years he has been organizing informal workshops on the philosophy of well-being. These have made a huge impact when it comes to building a friendly and welcoming community of scholars in the subfield. I am honoured/still flabbergasted to say that I received a personal invitation from Dale to attend the workshop in Helsinki and present a paper there a couple of years ago. Although it doesn’t diminish my sadness today, I am deeply thankful for that invitation, and for the the chance it gave me to see Dale in person again and convey some part of my debt to him.
I know how many other more junior scholars in the subfield who have similarly benefited from the philosophy of well-being community Dale has played such a central role in building.
I only hope we can honour this legacy through our own lives and work.

I had the pleasure of knowing Dale from my time at KU. Very nice guy. My thoughts and prayers go out to his family.

Erin and kids, Karen, Mark, and Jess—I’m so sorry for this incomprehensible loss. I never met Dale, but he was a frequent topic of conversation when I saw the Frykholms. They were so proud of his accomplishments. Sending love.

This is an awful loss, I’m crushed by it. Dale was one of my most important mentors, philosophical interlocutors, and friends. I’m writing a paper right now that engages with no fewer than five of his papers and one of his (many) books, and I was so excited to share it with him and hear what he thought. I can’t believe that won’t happen. 

He was just a couple of cohorts ahead of me career-wise, and the first time I met him was at the 2008 APA Eastern in Philadelphia when I was still a grad student and he had just started at University of Kansas. It was the first time I went up to someone I didn’t know and said “I’ve read your paper and I have questions.” I could hardly believe he was happy to talk to me. Little did I know that not only would I write a paper in reply, but that Dale would become the sort of friend and mentor to whom I would owe a huge debt of gratitude, and, more importantly, that Dale would offer the same openness to so many other new philosophers. 

Dale was a fantastic philosopher and great all-around person, full of joie de vivre. I’ll miss him terribly. 

In early March, I chat with Dale via email. I didn’t know him personally. I was introduced to him by Roger Crisp, who suggested his participation in an event I’m organizing in Brazil for September 2026, about theories of well-being. He had said he was tentatively able to confirm, but he needed to check dates as they seemed to coincide with his children’s back-to-school period. If I understood correctly, his wish was to come to Brazil with his family. When Lisa Forsberg informed me of Dale’s sad death, the news deeply affected me. I didn’t yet know him personally, but the conversation with him had encouraged me to learn more about his work. I have now sought out some of his writings and found that he was a highly original and thought-provoking philosopher. I am saddened by his loss and hope that his family and friends can cope with his passing. I hope to be able to honor him even before I have met him by reading his books and articles and debating them, despite the void his absence will certainly leave.

I have known Dale for over twenty years. He was one year ahead of me in graduate school at UC San Diego, but he was four years older than me, which in my early twenties still seemed like a gap; he had more life experience and seemed a good bit wiser than me. I learned a lot from him. I remember meeting him when I was a prospective graduate student. He was in the office next to mine, and kept something like banker’s hours, being in his office regularly through most of the work day. I was much less consistent and certainly much less of a morning person, but we still saw each other nearly every weekday for the better part of the four years we overlapped. He helped me learn how to be a graduate student and a philosopher. We talked about life and work, friends and relationships, department gossip, the need for occasional bouts of clean livin’. He came into my office regularly to ask my intuition about various ethical dilemmas and thought experiments, and often found my intuitions lacking. He was a mentor as well as a friend. 

I kept in touch with Dale after grad school. He came back to visit regularly in his first year or two after graduating, because he was dating a fellow student and dear friend who was a year behind me. I stood up with him at their wedding. We reconnected periodically in Lawrence and in Dallas, in Chicago and in New Orleans, and lately in Carbondale. We managed to stay a part of each others’ lives despite the sort of distance and time that makes that hard for grad school friends. 

Dale enjoyed good food and good drink. He was a musician and a music lover; he sang at my wedding. He thought seriously and laughed easily. He got along with pretty much everybody and was beloved by many. We worked on pretty distant topics in philosophy, and our views and tendencies were very different on most topics, but I always enjoyed talking philosophy with him. He was always interested in what I was doing, and always had new ideas to talk about. He was one of the most prolific writers I know, and his work was always good enough to make it into the best venues. He was the only philosopher I knew outside of philosophy of science, logic, or formal philosophy who used LaTeX to write most of his papers, I think just because he liked the way it looked better on the page than a Word document. His work was engaged with fundamentally important questions about how to live life well; it was both carefully engaged with the ideas that came before and generative of fruitful new conversations. His work could be careful and clear, dry and technical, charming and funny by turns. I wish I had read more of it while he was still here to talk to about it. 

He was, apparently, the happiest he’d ever been in Oxford. I was looking forward to hearing about his life there when we came for a planned visit this summer. I saw him less than a year ago, not long before they moved across the Atlantic. He was excited about the move. In an interview, when asked what he hoped to achieve in his new position there, he said, “First and foremost, I’d like my students to succeed, in whatever sense of success is meaningful to them. I’m also hopeful that I can fit into the wonderful community here at Somerville and Oxford. And maybe get a bit of writing done, too.” It sounds like Dale. I am glad he was so happy there, and I am sad that he did not get to spend more time in that happy place, working towards those goals. 

Dale wrote an article on what it means to have “A Good Death” (2017). To quote his conclusion, “When one’s death is part of, unified by, the project of his or her life, this death bears intrinsic good-making features. For some people, this intrinsic good-making feature is enough to render this death intrinsically good tout court. And for some of those people, the intrinsic goodness of death is enough to outweigh its potential instrumental disvalue.” I have little doubt that Dale died doing what he loved, working in an office in a beautiful old Oxford college. He died at the top of his intellectual powers, with an exciting new book forthcoming with Oxford UP and article forthcoming at the Journal of Philosophy. He built intellectual networks and institutions that will outlive him. He surely left some work undone, but I think it fair to say that his death fit with his life-project. He also left behind a wife and two daughters who really needed him and who were surely an equally important part of his projects. He died quickly. He died too young. I don’t know how to sort out how good or bad his death was, but I am sad that we can’t have a long conversation trying to sort out what his view implies about his case. 

My heart hurts for Erin and their two kids. All across the world, there are friends, students, colleagues, and other lives he touched, in mourning. I join the chorus now, although nothing I have to say feels quite right. I can’t capture my fondness and love for the man, my devastation at his lost, my heartbreak for all those many people whose devastation is surely deeper than mine.