Denis Laurence Dutton (9 February 1944 – 28 December 2010)[1] was an American philosopher of art, web entrepreneur, and media activist.

[6][7] Dutton was best known for the web aggregation site Arts & Letters Daily, which he founded in 1998 and which secured him a place among "the most influential media personalities in the world".

[1] In recognition of Arts & Letters Daily, Steven Pinker called Dutton a visionary for recognizing that a website "could be a forum for cutting-edge ideas, not just a way to sell things or entertain the bored".

[3] Dutton served as executive director of Cybereditions, a print on demand publishing company he founded in 2000[10] which specializes in new and out-of-print copyright works, mostly of a scholarly nature.

[17] As editor of the journal Philosophy and Literature, Dutton ran the Bad Writing Contest, which aimed to "expose 'pretentious, swaggering gibberish' passed off as scholarship at leading universities".

[18] In 1998, the contest awarded first place to philosopher and University of California-Berkeley Professor Judith Butler, for a sentence which appeared in the journal diacritics.

[27] After concluding his term as a director, Dr. Dutton and Dr. John Isles issued a report criticising Radio New Zealand for loss of neutrality in news and current affairs, failure to adhere to charter and opposed to contestable funding of broadcasting.