All of you, professional philosophers on the board—recognize this guy?
EDIT: (I’m keeping the bad link above, not to spoil the awesomeness of Erik’s remark below!)
I see that guy all over the web, usually on pages that are no longer maintained… 
To embed a dropbox image that way, you need to change the “www” to “dl”. Otherwise you’re trying to embed an HTML context page in an image tag.
Also, I have no idea who that is.
My research leads me to conclude with high probability that he is a basketball player, the rappers Akon and T.I., or a chef in an empty restaurant somewhere in East Asia.
(I might even know him or something, but my facial recognition software is broken.)
… dad?
Edit: Trust me, that was frickin’ hilarious before the pic was fixed.
I thought maybe a young Daniel Dennett - but it seems there never was a young Daniel Dennett.
Thanks, zarf.
Quining Dan Dennett, are we? (Even Santa’s beard wasn’t white from birth.)
My first thought was Dennett also. If it’s not Dennett, that beard-and-glasses combo has a namespace conflict.
(But the whiteboard probably means it was most likely taken in the last twenty years or so, and that’d be a super-young Dennett).
Indeed, it’s Dennett, lecturing at the then Department of Philosophy at the University of Gothenburg some time in the late 70’s or early 80’s – in all probability invited by his friend Bo Dahlbom. (Since it’s Dennett, you actually can’t tell that it’s around 1980 by the amount of beard, but you can by a pack of cigarettes being an integrating part of an academic lecture.)
This is true of philosophers more generally.
I certainly started growing a beard when I began my philosophy degree.
I started growing a beard when I started doing my philosophy PhD. I just never realised there was a causal connection.
(You know who has a real beard? Robert Brandom, he has a real beard.)
(He has a realer beard than Samuel Delany, even!)
I was at one time sporting a goatee and a ponytail. When I was in a sci-fi bookstore (Felix, maybe you know it - SF-bokhandeln in Stockholm) I realized that every single person in the store - just a handful, but still - had the same style. I had a friend cut my hair off the next weekend.
Philly in da house!
My socialite neighbor is pals with Chip. He has a beard, but he keeps it short.
There’s a sci-fi store in Gothenburg as well (there are only three of them in all of the country – on the other hand there are less than 10 million people in all of the country); I don’t remember any conspicuous beards last time I was there, though. Perhaps everybody else shaved and cut their hair, too.
I have had a beard basically since it started growing and I found out I didn’t like shaving*, but my father talked me out of studying philosophy**.
-
- Try explaining that to a bunch of religious Muslims in Mali who talk to you specifically because of the beard.
** - As he was the one who was going to pay for my study, he had quite a bit of influence. I finished studying math, and then informatics.
Gijsbert, what causal direction do you see?
Half of all the Swedish men in my social circles have long hair and a goatee. This doesn’t really say much because I only know two Swedes.
As for the philosophy-beard connection: with greater wisdom comes greater immunity to being swept up in pettiness and fashion, so the man’s natural will-to-beard can flourish. Also in intellectual circles it’s normal to be eccentric.
The only time I’ve ever had a beard was when my right hand was in a splint for a couple of months due to an Ultimate Frisbee accident. This was as it happens before I started grad school, though I went to Pittsburgh where Brandom may have been using all the available facial hair.