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Hubert Dreyfus
(1929 - 2017)

Last affiliation: University of California, Berkeley
  •  Home
  •  Publications
    180
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 More details
  • University of California, Berkeley
    Department of Philosophy
    Professor
Homepage
Berkeley, California, United States of America
Areas of Specialization
20th Century Philosophy
Continental Philosophy
Areas of Interest
20th Century Philosophy
Continental Philosophy
  • All publications (180)
  •  50
    Empirical evidence for a pessimistic prognosis for cognitive science
    Behavioral and Brain Sciences 1 (1): 105-105. 1978.
    Philosophy of Cognitive SciencePhilosophy of Psychology
  •  25
    Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics
    with Paul Rabinow
    Routledge. 2014.
    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 th…Read more
    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.
    Michel Foucault
  •  590
    The return of the myth of the mental
    Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 50 (4). 2007.
    McDowell's claim that "in mature human beings, embodied coping is permeated with mindedness",1 suggests a new version of the mentalist myth which, like the others, is untrue to the phenomenon. The phenomena show that embodied skills, when we are fully absorbed in enacting them, have a kind of non-mental content that is non-conceptual, non-propositional, non-rational and non-linguistic. This is not to deny that we can monitor our activity while performing it. For solving problems, learning a new …Read more
    McDowell's claim that "in mature human beings, embodied coping is permeated with mindedness",1 suggests a new version of the mentalist myth which, like the others, is untrue to the phenomenon. The phenomena show that embodied skills, when we are fully absorbed in enacting them, have a kind of non-mental content that is non-conceptual, non-propositional, non-rational and non-linguistic. This is not to deny that we can monitor our activity while performing it. For solving problems, learning a new skill, receiving coaching, and so forth, such monitoring is invaluable. But monitoring what we are doing as we are doing it degrades performance to at best competence. On McDowell's view, there is no way to account for such a degradation in performance since the same sort of content would be involved whether we were fully absorbed in or paying attention to what we were doing. McDowell claims that it is an advantage of his conceptualism that it avoids any foundationalist attempt to build up the objective world on the basis of an indubitable Given or any other ground-floor experience. And, indeed, if the world is all that is the case and our minds are unproblematically open to it, all experience is on the same footing. But one must distinguish motor intentionality, and the interrelated solicitations our coping body is intertwined with, from conceptual intentionality and the world of propositional structures it opens onto. The existential phenomenologist can then agree with McDowell in rejecting traditional foundationalisms, while yet affirming and describing the ground-floor role of motor intentionality in providing the support on which all forms of conceptual intentionality are based.
    Philosophy of MindPerceptionConceptual and Nonconceptual Content
  •  115
    Could anything be more intelligible than everyday intelligibility?: Reinterpreting division I of Being and Time in the light of division II
    In James E. Faulconer & Mark A. Wrathall (eds.), Appropriating Heidegger, Cambridge University Press. pp. 155--174. 2000.
    Martin Heidegger
  •  482
    Kierkegaard on the Internet: Anonymity vs. Commitment in the Present Age
    Kierkegaard Studies Yearbook 1999 (1): 96-109. 1999.
    Søren KierkegaardInternet
  •  230
    Saving the Sacred from the Axial Revolution
    with Sean Dorrance Kelly
    Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 54 (2): 195-203. 2011.
    Prominent defenders of the Enlightenment, like Jürgen Habermas, are beginning to recognize that the characterization of human beings in entirely rational and secular terms leaves out something important. Religion, they admit, plays an important role in human existence. But the return to a traditional monotheistic religion seems sociologically difficult after the death of God. We argue that Homeric polytheism retains a phenomenologically rich account of the sacred, and a similarly rich understand…Read more
    Prominent defenders of the Enlightenment, like Jürgen Habermas, are beginning to recognize that the characterization of human beings in entirely rational and secular terms leaves out something important. Religion, they admit, plays an important role in human existence. But the return to a traditional monotheistic religion seems sociologically difficult after the death of God. We argue that Homeric polytheism retains a phenomenologically rich account of the sacred, and a similarly rich understanding of human existence in its midst. By opening ourselves up to the moods of wonder and gratitude at the root of Homer's sense of the sacred, we can re-appropriate a polytheistic understanding of the sacred that allows us to recover and revive the intensity and meaningfulness that Homer's polytheists enjoyed.
    Continental Philosophy
  •  102
    Single-World versus Plural-World Antiessentialism: A Reply to Tim Dean
    with Charles Spinosa
    Critical Inquiry 23 (4): 921-932. 1997.
    Continental PhilosophyPhenomenology
  •  4
    How to stop worrying about the frame problem even though it's computationally insoluble
    with Stuart E. Dreyfus
    In Zenon W. Pylyshyn (ed.), The Robot's Dilemma: The Frame Problem in Artificial Intelligence, Ablex. pp. 95--112. 1987.
    The Frame Problem
  •  513
    Refocusing the question: Can there be skillful coping without propositional representations or brain representations? (review)
    Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 1 (4): 413-25. 2002.
    AI without Representation?Skepticism about RepresentationsRepresentation in NeuroscienceSubsymbolic …Read more
    AI without Representation?Skepticism about RepresentationsRepresentation in NeuroscienceSubsymbolic Computation
  •  86
    Anonimato y compromiso en la época actual: S0ren Kierkegaard y el intemet
    Areté. Revista de Filosofía 12 (1): 117-131. 2000.
    No contiene resumen.
    Søren Kierkegaard
  •  179
    Wild on Heidegger: Comments
    Journal of Philosophy 60 (22): 677-680. 1963.
    Martin HeideggerPhenomenology
  •  45
    Husserl et Les sciences cognitives
    with J. -Ph Jazé
    Les Etudes Philosophiques. forthcoming.
    Continental PhilosophyEdmund HusserlHusserl: Science, Logic, and Mathematics
  •  126
    Phenomenology and mechanism
    Noûs 5 (1): 81-96. 1971.
  •  78
    Agir, intentionnalité et être-au-monde
    Philosophiques 20 (2): 285-302. 1993.
    20th Century Continental Philosophy20th Century German PhilosophyPhenomenology
  •  347
    Why computers must have bodies in order to be intelligent
    Review of Metaphysics 21 (1): 13-32. 1967.
    IN SEPTEMBER 1957, Herbert Simon, a pioneer in cognitive simulation, predicted that within ten years, i.e., by now, a computer would be world chess champion and would prove an important mathematical theorem. This prediction was based on Simon's early initial success in writing a program that could play legal chess and one able to prove simple theorems in logic and geometry. But the early successes turned out to be based on the solution of problems that were simple for machines, and further progr…Read more
    IN SEPTEMBER 1957, Herbert Simon, a pioneer in cognitive simulation, predicted that within ten years, i.e., by now, a computer would be world chess champion and would prove an important mathematical theorem. This prediction was based on Simon's early initial success in writing a program that could play legal chess and one able to prove simple theorems in logic and geometry. But the early successes turned out to be based on the solution of problems that were simple for machines, and further progress turned out to be more and more difficult, until recently it has begun to be obvious to interested observers, and even to some workers in the field, that the original optimism of Simon and company was unfounded.
    Artificial Minds, Misc
  • Foucault et la psychothérapie
    Revue Internationale de Philosophie 44 (2): 209. 1990.
  •  1
    Nihilism online : the future of information technology seen in 1850 by Sören Kierkegaard
    Franciscanum 44 (130-132): 287-300. 2002.
  •  1175
    The Current Relevance of Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Embodiment
    Electronic Journal of Analytic Philosophy. 1996.
    In this paper I would like to explain, defend, and draw out the implications of this claim. Since the intentional arc is supposed to embody the interconnection of skillful action and perception, I will first lay out an account of skill.
    Maurice Merleau-PontyEmbodiment and Situated Cognition
  •  66
    Cognitivism vs. Hermeneutics
    Behavioral and Brain Sciences 1 (2): 233-234. 1978.
    Philosophy of Cognitive ScienceHermeneutics, MiscAspects of ConsciousnessEmotions
  • La vittoria di Deep Blue su Kasparov dimostra il successo dell’intelligenza artificiale?
    with Daniel Dennett
    Discipline Filosofiche 14 (2). 2004.
  •  2
    The perceptual noema: Gurwitsch's crucial contribution
    In Aron Gurwitsch & Lester Embree (eds.), Life-world and consciousness, Northwestern University Press. pp. 135--139. 1972.
    Husserl: Noesis and Noema
  •  159
    Between Man and Nature
    The Harvard Review of Philosophy 1 (1): 6-19. 1991.
  •  11
    Intentionality and the phenomenology of action
    with Jerome C. Wakefield
    In Ernest Lepore (ed.), John Searle and His Critics, Blackwell. 1991.
    Consciousness of Action
  •  1767
    Intelligence without representation – Merleau-ponty's critique of mental representation the relevance of phenomenology to scientific explanation
    Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 1 (4): 367-383. 2002.
    Existential phenomenologists hold that the two most basic forms of intelligent behavior, learning, and skillful action, can be described and explained without recourse to mind or brain representations. This claim is expressed in two central notions in Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception: the intentional arc and the tendency to achieve a maximal grip. The intentional arc names the tight connection between body and world, such that, as the active body acquires skills, those skills are stor…Read more
    Existential phenomenologists hold that the two most basic forms of intelligent behavior, learning, and skillful action, can be described and explained without recourse to mind or brain representations. This claim is expressed in two central notions in Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception: the intentional arc and the tendency to achieve a maximal grip. The intentional arc names the tight connection between body and world, such that, as the active body acquires skills, those skills are stored, not as representations in the mind, but as dispositions to respond to the solicitations of situations in the world. A phenomenology of skill acquisition confirms that, as one acquires expertise, the acquired know-how is experienced as finer and finer discriminations of situations paired with the appropriate response to each. Maximal grip names the body's tendency to refine its responses so as to bring the current situation closer to an optimal gestalt. Thus, successful learning and action do not require propositional mental representations. They do not require semantically interpretable brain representations either.Simulated neural networks exhibit crucial structural features of the intentional arc, and Walter Freeman's account of the brain dynamics underlying perception and action is structurally isomorphic with Merleau-Ponty's account of the way a skilled agent is led by the situation to move towards obtaining a maximal grip.
    Maurice Merleau-PontyKnowledge HowEmbodiment and Situated CognitionThe Concept of IntelligenceSkepti…Read more
    Maurice Merleau-PontyKnowledge HowEmbodiment and Situated CognitionThe Concept of IntelligenceSkepticism about RepresentationsAI without Representation?
  •  90
    Searle's Freudian slip
    Behavioral and Brain Sciences 13 (4): 603-604. 1990.
  •  42
    Zwei Arten des Antiessentialismus und ihre Konsequenzen
    with Charles Spinosa
    Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie 45 (1): 23-50. 1997.
  •  2363
    Husserl, Intentionality, and Cognitive Science (edited book)
    MIT Press. 1984.
    As this book makes clear, current use of data structures such as frames, scripts, and stereotypes in psychology, artificial intelligence, and all the other disciplines now grouped together as Cognitive Science develop ideas already explored by Husserl who believed that the analysis of mental representations was the proper subject of philosophy, psychology, and other disciplines that deal with the mind. This new anthology will serve as an ideal introduction to phenomenology for analytic philosoph…Read more
    As this book makes clear, current use of data structures such as frames, scripts, and stereotypes in psychology, artificial intelligence, and all the other disciplines now grouped together as Cognitive Science develop ideas already explored by Husserl who believed that the analysis of mental representations was the proper subject of philosophy, psychology, and other disciplines that deal with the mind. This new anthology will serve as an ideal introduction to phenomenology for analytic philosophers, both as a text and as the single most useful source book on Husserl for cognitive scientists. An MIT Press/Bradford Book.
    Husserl: Intentionality, MiscHusserl: Phenomenology and Cognitive Science
  • Philosophy Of Psychology
    with John Haugeland
    Macmillan. 1974.
    Philosophy of Psychology
  •  94
    All Things Shining: Reading the Western Classics to Find Meaning in a Secular Age
    Free Press. 2011.
    Our contemporary nihilism -- Homer's polytheism -- From Aeschylus to Augustine : monotheism on the rise -- From Dante to Kant : the attractions and dangers of autonomy -- Fanaticism, polytheism, and Melville's "evil art" -- David Foster Wallace's nihilism -- Conclusion : lives worth living in a secular age.
    Philosophy of ReligionAutonomy, MiscHistory: Autonomy
  •  6
    What is maturity? Habermas and Foucault on “What is enlightenment?”
    with Paul Rabinow
    In Michel Foucault & David Couzens Hoy (eds.), Foucault: a critical reader, Blackwell. pp. 109--121. 1986.
    Michel Foucault
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