Hubert L. Dreyfus

An inspirational book that is “a smart, sweeping run through the history of Western philosophy. Important for the way it illuminates life today and for the controversial advice it offers on how to live” ( The New York Times ).“What constitutes human excellence?” and “What is the best way to live a life?” These are questions that human beings have been asking since the beginning of time. In their critically acclaimed book, All Things Shining , Hubert Dreyfus and Sean Dorrance Kelly argue that our search for meaning was once fulfilled by our responsiveness to forces greater than ourselves, whether one God or many. These forces drew us in and imbued the ordinary moments of life with wonder and gratitude. Dreyfus and Kelly argue in this thought-provoking work that as we began to rely on the power of our own independent will we lost our skill for encountering the sacred.Through their original and transformative discussion of some of the greatest works of Western literature, from Homer’s Odyssey to Melville’s Moby Dick, Dreyfus and Kelly reveal how we have lost our passionate engagement with the things that gave our lives purpose, and show how, by reading our culture’s classics anew, we can once again be drawn into intense involvement with the wonder and beauty of the world.Well on its way to becoming a classic itself, this inspirational book will change the way we understand our culture, our history, our sacred practices, and ourselves.

This book, which Foucault himself has judged accurate, 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 fo 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."There are many new secondary sources [on Foucault]. None surpass the book by Hubert Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow. . . . The American paperback edition contains Foucault's 'On the Genealogy of Ethics,' a lucid interview that is now our best source for seeing how he construed the whole project of the history of sexuality."—David Hoy, London Review of Books

Being-in-the-World is a guide to one of the most influential philosophical works of this century: Division I of Part One of Being and Time, where Martin Heidegger works out an original and powerful account of being-in-the-world which he then uses to ground a profound critique of traditional ontology and epistemology. Hubert Dreyfus's commentary opens the way for a new appreciation of this difficult philosopher, revealing a rigorous and illuminating vocabulary that is indispensable for talking about the phenomenon of world.The publication of Being and Time in 1927 turned the academic world on its head. Since then it has become a touchstone for philosophers as diverse as Marcuse, Sartre, Foucault, and Derrida who seek an alternative to the rationalist Cartesian tradition of western philosophy. But Heidegger's text is notoriously dense, and his language seems to consist of unnecessarily barbaric neologisms; to the neophyte and even to those schooled in Heidegger thought, the result is often incomprehensible.Dreyfus's approach to this daunting book is straightforward and pragmatic. He explains the text by frequent examples drawn from everyday life, and he skillfully relates Heidegger's ideas to the questions about being and mind that have preoccupied a generation of cognitive scientists and philosophers of mind.

When it was first published in 1972, Hubert Dreyfus's manifesto on the inherent inability of disembodied machines to mimic higher mental functions caused an uproar in the artificial intelligence community. The world has changed since then. Today it is clear that "good old-fashioned AI," based on the idea of using symbolic representations to produce general intelligence, is in decline (although several believers still pursue its pot of gold), and the focus of the AI community has shifted to more complex models of the mind. It has also become more common for AI researchers to seek out and study philosophy. For this edition of his now classic book, Dreyfus has added a lengthy new introduction outlining these changes and assessing the paradigms of connectionism and neural networks that have transformed the field. At a time when researchers were proposing grand plans for general problem solvers and automatic translation machines, Dreyfus predicted that they would fail because their conception of mental functioning was naive, and he suggested that they would do well to acquaint themselves with modern philosophical approaches to human being. "What Computers Still Can't Do" was widely attacked but quietly studied. Dreyfus's arguments are still provocative and focus our attention once again on what it is that makes human beings unique.

Drawing on a diverse array of thinkers from Plato to Kierkegaard, On the Internet is one of the first books to bring philosophical insight to the debate on how far the internet can and cannot take us.Dreyfus shows us the roots of the disembodied, free floating web surfer in Descartes' separation of mind and body, and how Kierkegaard's insights into the birth of the modern reading public anticipate the news-hungry, but disinterested risk avoiding internet junkie. Drawing on recent studies of the isolation experienced by many internet users, Dreyfus shows how the internet's privatisation of experience ignores essential human capacities such as trust, moods, risk, shared local concerns and commitment. On the Internet is essential reading for anyone on line and all those interested in our place in the e-revolution.

A picture held us captive, writes Wittgenstein in the Philosophical Investigations, describing the powerful image of mind that underlies the modern epistemological tradition from Descartes onward. Retrieving Realism offers a radical critique of the Cartesian epistemic picture that has captivated philosophy for too long and restores a realist view affirming our direct access to the everyday world and to the physical universe.According to Descartes, knowledge exists in the form of ideas in the mind that purportedly represent the world. This mediational epistemology (internal ideas mediating external reality) continues to exert a grip on Western thought, and even philosophers such as Quine, Rorty, and Davidson who have claimed to refute Descartes remain imprisoned within its regime. As Hubert Dreyfus and Charles Taylor show, knowledge consists of much more than the explicit representations we formulate. We gain knowledge of the world through bodily engagement with it by handling things, moving among them, responding to them and these forms of knowing cannot be understood in mediational terms. Dreyfus and Taylor also contest Descartes' privileging of the individual mind, arguing that much of our understanding of the world is necessarily shared.Once we deconstruct Cartesian mediationalism, the problems that Hume, Kant, and many of our contemporaries still struggle with trying to prove the existence of objects beyond our representations fall away, as does the motivation for nonrealist doctrines. We can then begin to describe the background everyday world we are absorbed in and the universe of natural kinds discovered by science.

Defining the limits of computer technology, the authors make a compelling case that binary logic will always be inferior to human intuitive ability. A stunning reaffirmation of human intelligence.

When it was first published in 1972, Hubert Dreyfus's manifesto on the inherent inability of disembodied machines to mimic higher mental functions caused an uproar in the artificial intelligence community. The world has changed since then. Today it is clear that "good old-fashioned AI," based on the idea of using symbolic representations to produce general intelligence, is in decline (although several believers still pursue its pot of gold), and the focus of the Al community has shifted to more complex models of the mind. It has also become more common for AI researchers to seek out and study philosophy. For this edition of his now classic book, Dreyfus has added a lengthy new introduction outlining these changes and assessing the paradigms of connectionism and neural networks that have transformed the field.At a time when researchers were proposing grand plans for general problem solvers and automatic translation machines, Dreyfus predicted that they would fail because their conception of mental functioning was naive, and he suggested that they would do well to acquaint themselves with modern philosophical approaches to human beings. What Computers Can't Do was widely attacked but quietly studied. Dreyfus's arguments are still provocative and focus our attention once again on what it is that makes human beings unique.Hubert L. Dreyfus, who is Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley, is also the author of Being-in-the-World. A Commentary on Heidegger's Being and Time, Division I.

For fifty years Hubert Dreyfus has addressed an astonishing range of issues in the fields of phenomenology, existentialism, cognitive science, and the philosophical study of mind. Dreyfus has inspired a whole generation of philosophers as he has creatively drawn on and clearly articulated the seminal works of thinkers like Kierkegaard, Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty and Foucault. This volume presents a selection of Dreyfus's most influential essays on mind and action.The book begins with a model of skillful engaged human action, which informs much of Dreyfus's philosophy, and was developed in collaboration with Stuart Dreyfus. The volume then presents articles developing a critique of the representational model of the mind in analytical philosophy of mind and mainstream cognitive science. Dreyfus argues that representational models of mind offer an impoverished and distorting account of human engagement with the world. The chapters show this by addressing issues in philosophy of mind and the cognitive sciences through the skill model.

این کتاب روایتی است از حدود دوازده ساعت شرح فلسفی هیوبرت دریفوس از رمان برادران کارامازوف فیودور داستایفسکی، در درسگفتاری با عنوان یاد شده که به سال ۲۰۰۷، ده سال پیش از درگذشت او، ارائه شده است.آنچه خواهید خواند، به‌هیچ‌رو تقریر طابق النعل بالنعل سخنان او در این درسگفتار نیست. درآوردن قالب شفاهی به قالب مکتوب، لاجرم مستلزم جرح‌وتعدیل و در مواردی حذف‌واضافه‌هایی است که کتاب حاضر را در معنای دقیق کلمه به روایتی از روایت دریفوس تبدیل می‌کند.

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 givemeaning to our activities, our tasks, our normative commitments, our aims and our goals.

کتاب «اندرونیِ عُلیا» به شرح هیوبرت دریفوس از ترس ‌و‌لرز نوشتۀ سورن کی‌یرکگور اختصاص دارد، گرچه در ضمیمه‌ای کوتاه، تکملۀ او راجع‌به بیماری منتهی به مرگ او نیز آمده است.دریفوس ترس ‌و‌لرز را به‌طور مبسوط شرح می‌دهد و به ذکر گزیده‌ای از نخستین بخشِ به‌غایت دشوار بیماری منتهی به مرگ بسنده می‌کند، گزیده‌ای که می‌توان آن را چارچوب نظریِ دریفوس برای شرح برادران کارامازوف دانست. دریفوس در این درس‌گفتار فیلم هیروشیما عشق من را نیز بررسی می‌کند.

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 [ 0-415-94041-9].

هوبرت دریفوس، در ادامهٔ مجموعه بازخوانی آثار ادبی، بعد از موبی‌دیک و برادران کارامازوف، به ادیسهٔ هومر می‌رسد.دریفوس معتقد است که ادیسه، تجلی چندخدایی در ادبیات است، همانطور که کمدی الهی بازنمایی تک‌خدایی.به عنوان یک انسان که همیشه مدرن زیسته است، شاید از خود بپرسیم که زیستن در دنیای پیشافلسفهٔ یونانی، چطور بوده است؟ فرض گرفتن یک دنیای اساطیری از چه ذهنیت‌هایی نسبت به هستی ناشی می‌شود؟ آیا واقعاً آنطور که نیچه می‌گوید انسان‌های پیشافلسفه، شادتر می‌زیسته‌اند؟ اینها، و چندین سؤال دیگر، چیزهایی است که دریفوس با دقت در متن ادیسه به ما نشان می‌دهد.

آنجه در شرح اورستیا خواهیم دید تقابل عاطفه و عقل است. دریفوس عقل را سرد و کلّی و منتزع و منفصل می‌انگارد و آن را به نظاره‌گری ربط می‌دهد. در مقابل، عاطفه گرم و جزئی و انضمامی و درگیر است و به استغراق هستی پیوند می‌خورد. اما این امر به معنای تأیید بی‌چون‌وچرای عاطفه نیست. دریفوس با عواطفی مانند خشم و انتقام بر سر مهر نیست و حیاتِ وقف این حال وجودی را حیاتی تُنُک‌مایه می‌خواند. ولی برتری عاطفه بر عقل، دست‌کم در تفسیر دریفوس، این است که سویه‌های سیاهِ عاطفه را می‌توان از راه مهرپروردگی (پوئسیس) چاره کرد.

Según Descartes, el conocimiento existe en forma de ideas, que supuestamente representan el mundo. Esta epistemología -ideas que median entre la realidad externa y nuestra mente- sigue ejerciendo un control sobre el pensamiento occidental. Sin embargo, como muestran Dreyfus y Taylor, el conocimiento consiste en mucho más que en las representaciones explícitas que formulamos. Ganamos en conocimiento del mundo mediante un compromiso corporal con las cosas, las manejamos, nos movemos entre ellas y nos interrogamos sobre su significado.

Berkeley University course

Spring 2008 Philosophy 189

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 [ 0-415-94041-9].