Hubert Dreyfus

(1929 - 2017)

Martin Heidegger was the first philosopher to see skillful coping as the basis of our understanding of the world and ourselves. But he acknowledges that such average understanding is banal and conceals more than it reveals. He, therefore, holds that, to ground intelligibility, people must conform to everyday practical norms, but that, by acting in the face of anxiety, a person can resist conformism and refine standard ways of acting. His model is Aristotle’s phronimos (man of practical wisdom) who responds with ethical expertise to the demands of the concrete situation. Further, Heidegger suggests that, when a person is fully authentic, he or she can transform everyday practice. Here, his model is Kierkegaard’s reborn individuals whom Heidegger sees as radical world disclosers capable of changing the issue for their age and so of changing history.

Heidegger and the study of his thought have earned wide acceptance, extending beyond philosophy to influence an array of other disciplines. Critically selected by leading scholars in the field, the articles in this new collection bring together the most essential and representative scholarship on Heidegger. Focusing on the major phases of his work which attracted most attention from contemporary thinkers, as well as exploring new and important areas of Heidegger scholarship, this four-volume set is an invaluable resource for any curriculum supporting philosophy, as well as political theory, literature, classics, anthropology, and cultural studies. This volume is available on its own or as part of the four-volume set, Heidegger Reexamined . For a complete list of the volume titles in this set, see the listing for Heidegger Reexamined [ISBN: 0-415-94041-9].

We assume that acting ethically is a skill. We then use a phenomenological description of five stages of skill acquisition to argue that an ethics based on principles corresponds to a beginner’s reliance on rules and so is developmentally inferior to an ethics based on expert response that claims that, after long experience, the ethical expert learns to respond appropriately to each unique situation. The skills model thus supports an ethics of situated involvement such as that of Aristotle, John Dewey, and Carol Gilligan against the detached, rationalist ethics of Kant, John Rawls, Lawrence Kohlberg, and Jürgen Habermas.

Heidegger's Being and Time: Critical Essays provides a variety of recent studies of Heidegger's most important work. Twelve prominent scholars, representing diverse nationalities, generations, and interpretive approaches deal with general methodological and ontological questions, particular issues in Heidegger's text, and the relation between Being and Time and Heidegger's later thought. All of the essays presented in this volume were never before available in an English-language anthology. Two of the essays have never before been published in any language ; three of the essays have never been published in English before , and two of the essays provide previews of works in progress by major scholars

Human intuition and perception are basic and essential phenomena of consciousness. As such, they will never be replicated by computers. This is the challenging notion of Hubert Dreyfus, Ph. D., archcritic of the artificial intelligence establishment. It's important to emphasize that he doesn't believe that AI is fundamentally impossible, only that the current research program is fatally flawed. Instead, he argues that to get a device (or devices) with human-like intelligence would require them to have a human-like being in the world, which would require them to have bodies more or less like ours, and social acculturation (i.e. a society) more or less like ours. This helps to explain the practical problems in implementing artificial intelligence algorithms.

This volume presents a selection of Hubert Dreyfus's pioneering work in bringing phenomenology and existentialism to bear on the philosophical and scientific study of the mind. Each of the thirteen essays interprets, develops, and extends the insights of his predecessors working in the European philosophical tradition. One of Dreyfus' central contributions to reading the historical canon of philosophy comes from his recognition that great philosophers help us to understand the -background practices- of a culture - the practices that shape and embody our most basic understanding of ourselves and the things and situations we encounter in our world. Background practices are all too often overlooked completely, or else their importance is misunderstood. Each chapter in this volume shows in one way or another how a broad range of philosophical topics can only be properly understood when we recognize how they are grounded in the background practices that shape our lives and give meaning to our activities, our tasks, our normative commitments, our aims and our goals.