Hubert Dreyfus

(1929 - 2017)

Can we accept John McDowell’s Kantian claim that perception is conceptual “all the way out,” thereby denying the more basic perceptual capacities we seem to share with prelinguistic infants and higher animals? More generally, can philosophers successfully describe the conceptual upper floors of the edifice of knowledge while ignoring the embodied coping going on the ground floor? This chapter argues that we shouldn’t leave the conceptual component of our lives hanging in midair and suggests how philosophers who want to understand knowledge and action can profit from a phenomenological analysis of the nonconceptual embodied coping skills we share with animals and infants, as well as the nonconceptual immediate intuitive understanding exhibited by experts.

This chapter argues first that there is an essential difference between theoretical and practical holism and thus there is an essential difference between the natural and human sciences. If one holds that there is no crucial difference between things and people one must embrace some form of nihilism—a way of life in which all values have the same value, everything is equal, or, to put it another way, there are no meaningful differences. However, if there _is_ a crucial difference between self-interpreting human beings and other sorts of entities, one can counter the nihilistic possibility of what Rorty calls “conversations” between those who have opposed “preferences” with the possibility of genuine conflicts of interpretation as to the serious issues worth conversing about.

This chapter reviews Heidegger’s argument for two kinds of intentionality, characteristic of, respectively, skillful activity and deliberate action. The kind of intentionality with self-referential content that philosophers like Searle and Husserl focus on is a derivative mode of intentionality that occurs only when there’s some disturbance in our normal, unimpeded everyday activity. The chapter concludes that both these modes of intentionality presuppose being-in-the-world, a more fundamental form of intentionality that Heidegger calls originary transcendence, and that he claims is the condition of the possibility of both active and contemplative intentionality.

The chapter defends the relevance, indeed, the primacy, of phenomenology by showing that absorbed coping is the background condition of the possibility of all forms of comportment. This chapter argues that when logical analysis goes beyond phenomenology, it misses the phenomena of absorbed coping—an important kind of activity—and social norms—a level of social reality whose causal structures it nonetheless presupposes. To do justice to these phenomena, we need a richer ontology than the Cartesian ontology of minds and nature assumed by philosophers as diverse as Husserl and Searle.

Are there two fundamentally different ways we make sense of the world, or does all understanding consist in using concepts to think about things? The philosophical tradition has generally assumed—or, in the case of Kant, argued persuasively—that there is only one kind of intelligibility, the unified understanding we have of things when we make judgments that objectify our experience by bringing it under concepts. By calling attention to the structure of nonconceptual, practical perception and showing how its judgments can be transformed into the judgments of detached thought, Todes is able to provide a framework in which to explain how the content of perception, while not itself conceptual, can provide the basis for conception.

This chapter develops the ontological implications of the fundamental nature of fluid coping for our engagement with the world. For the user, equipment is a solicitation to act, not an entity with a function feature. These solicitations make up the situation on the basis of which we sometimes step back from our involved engagement with the world and disclose entities. Human understanding thus involves an “intentional arc,” a feedback loop in which our actions and projections are drawn out of us by the meaningful features of the world and, in turn, alter the way the world shows up as soliciting us. The phenomenology of skillful coping coheres well Walter Freeman’s account of the brain as a nonlinear dynamical system.

In opposition to mainline cognitive science, which assumes that intelligent behavior must be based on representations in the mind or brain, Merleau-Ponty holds that the most basic sort of intelligent behavior, skillful coping, can and must be understood without recourse to any type of representation. He marshals convincing phenomenological evidence that higher primates and human beings learn to act skillfully without acquiring _mental_ representations of the skill domain and of their goals. He also saw that no brain model available at the time he wrote could explain how this was possible. This chapter argues that now, however, there _are_ models of brain function that show how skills could be acquired and exercised without mind or brain representations.

This chapter takes up the debate between Føllesdal’s and Gurwitsch’s interpretations of Husserl’s perceptual noema. It argues that this debate grows out of an ambiguity in Husserl’s treatment of the noema. This ambiguity is itself the result of the difficult problem of explaining the intentional structure of perception, a problem that can only be resolved by understanding the embodied skilful foundation of perception experience. Thus, the problem inherent in Husserl’s concept of the noema points the way beyond a transcendental phenomenological approach to consciousness, toward the existential phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty.

_A Companion to Phenomenology and Existentialism_ is a complete guide to two of the dominant movements of philosophy in the twentieth century. Written by a team of leading scholars, including Dagfinn Føllesdal, J. N. Mohanty, Robert Solomon, Jean-Luc Marion Highlights the area of overlap between the two movements Features longer essays discussing each of the main schools of thought, shorter essays introducing prominent themes, and problem-oriented chapters Organised topically, around concepts such as temporality, intentionality, death and nihilism Features essays on unusual subjects, such as medicine, the emotions, artificial intelligence, and environmental philosophy.

_The _Blackwell Companion to Heidegger_ is a complete guide to the work and thought of Martin Heidegger, one of the most influential philosophers of the twentieth century._ Considers the most important elements of Heidegger’s intellectual biography, including his notorious involvement with National Socialism Provides a systematic and comprehensive exploration of Heidegger's work One of the few books on Heidegger to cover his later work as well as _Being and Time_ Includes key critical responses to Heidegger's philosophy Contributors include many of the leading interpreters of, and commentators on, the work of Heidegger.

Disclosing New Worlds calls for a recovery of a way of being that has always characterized human life at its best. The book argues that human beings are at their best not when they are engaged in abstract reflection, but when they are intensely involved in changing the taken-for-granted, everyday practices in some domain of their culture--that is, when they are making history. History-making, in this account, refers not to wars and transfers of political power, but to changes in the way we understand and deal with ourselves. The authors identify entrepreneurship, democratic action, and the creation of solidarity as the three major arenas in which people make history, and they focus on three prime methods of history-making--reconfiguration, cross-appropriation, and articulation.

Hubert Dreyfus is one of the foremost advocates of European philosophy in the anglophone world. His clear, jargon-free interpretations of the leading thinkers of the European tradition of philosophy have done a great deal to erase the analytic–Continental divide. But Dreyfus is not just an influential interpreter of Continental philosophers; he is a creative, iconoclastic thinker in his own right. Drawing on the work of Heidegger, Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, Foucault, and Kierkegaard, Dreyfus makes significant contributions to contemporary conversations about mind, authenticity, technology, nihilism, modernity and postmodernity, art, scientific realism, and religion. This volume collects thirteen of Dreyfus’s most influential essays, each of which interprets, develops, and extends the insights of his predecessors working in phenomenological and existential philosophy. The essays exemplify a distinctive feature of his approach to philosophy, namely the way his work inextricably intertwines the interpretation of texts with his own analysis and description of the phenomena at issue. In fact, these two tasks—textual exegesis and phenomenological description—are for Dreyfus necessarily dependent on each other. In approaching philosophy in this way, Dreyfus is an heir to Heidegger’s own historically oriented style of phenomenology.

_The _Blackwell Companion to Heidegger_ is a complete guide to the work and thought of Martin Heidegger, one of the most influential philosophers of the twentieth century._ Considers the most important elements of Heidegger’s intellectual biography, including his notorious involvement with National Socialism Provides a systematic and comprehensive exploration of Heidegger's work One of the few books on Heidegger to cover his later work as well as _Being and Time_ Includes key critical responses to Heidegger's philosophy Contributors include many of the leading interpreters of, and commentators on, the work of Heidegger.

_A Companion to Phenomenology and Existentialism_ is a complete guide to two of the dominant movements of philosophy in the twentieth century. Written by a team of leading scholars, including Dagfinn Føllesdal, J. N. Mohanty, Robert Solomon, Jean-Luc Marion Highlights the area of overlap between the two movements Features longer essays discussing each of the main schools of thought, shorter essays introducing prominent themes, and problem-oriented chapters Organised topically, around concepts such as temporality, intentionality, death and nihilism Features essays on unusual subjects, such as medicine, the emotions, artificial intelligence, and environmental philosophy.

_Internet_ is een van de eerste boeken waarin het filosofische inzicht -van Plato tot Kierkegaard - betrokken wordt op het debat over de mogelijkheden en onmogelijkheden van het internet. Dreyfus laat zien dat de onstoffelijke, 'vrij zwevende' websurfer zijn oorsprong vindt in Descartes' scheiding van geest en lichaam, en hoe Kierkegaards inzichten in de opkomst van het moderne leespubliek vooruitlopen op de nieuwsgierige, maar elk risico vermijdende internet-junkie. Uitgaande van recente onderzoeken naar het isolement dat veel internetgebruikers ervaren, toont Dreyfus aan hoe het internet, door zijn nadruk op privé-ervaringen, gebruikers berooft van wezenlijke, belichaamde vermogens zoals vertrouwen, stemmingen en betrokkenheid bij met anderen gedeelde lokale aangelegenheden. _Internet_ is verplichte kost voor iedereen die on line is en is geïnteressseerd in onze plaats in de 'e-revolutie'.

This book is the first to provide a sustained, coherent analysis of Foucault's work as a whole. To demonstrate the sense in which Foucault's work is beyond structuralism and hermeneutics, the authors unfold a careful, analytical exposition of his oeuvre. They argue that during the of Foucault's work became a sustained and largely successful effort to develop a new method - "interpretative analytics" - capable of explaining both the logic of structuralism's claim to be an objective science and the apparent validity of the hermeneutical counterclaim that the human sciences can proceed only by understanding the deepest meaning of the subject and his tradition.

_Internet_ is een van de eerste boeken waarin het filosofische inzicht -van Plato tot Kierkegaard - betrokken wordt op het debat over de mogelijkheden en onmogelijkheden van het internet. Dreyfus laat zien dat de onstoffelijke, 'vrij zwevende' websurfer zijn oorsprong vindt in Descartes' scheiding van geest en lichaam, en hoe Kierkegaards inzichten in de opkomst van het moderne leespubliek vooruitlopen op de nieuwsgierige, maar elk risico vermijdende internet-junkie. Uitgaande van recente onderzoeken naar het isolement dat veel internetgebruikers ervaren, toont Dreyfus aan hoe het internet, door zijn nadruk op privé-ervaringen, gebruikers berooft van wezenlijke, belichaamde vermogens zoals vertrouwen, stemmingen en betrokkenheid bij met anderen gedeelde lokale aangelegenheden. _Internet_ is verplichte kost voor iedereen die on line is en is geïnteressseerd in onze plaats in de 'e-revolutie'.