Hubert Dreyfus

Hubert Lederer Dreyfus (/ˈdraɪfəs/; October 15, 1929 – 22 April 2017) was an American philosopher and professor of philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley. His main interests included phenomenology, existentialism and the philosophy of both psychology and literature, as well as the philosophical implications of artificial intelligence. Dreyfus was known for his exegesis of Martin Heidegger, which critics labeled "Dreydegger". Dreyfus was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2001 and is a recipient of the Harbison Prize for Outstanding Teaching at UC Berkeley. Erasmus University awarded Dreyfus an honorary doctorate "for his brilliant and highly influential work in the field of artificial intelligence, and for his equally outstanding contributions to the analysis and interpretation of twentieth century continental philosophy". A number of his students have gone on to hold tenured positions in leading American philosophy departments while working on themes related to Heidegger and phenomenology, including Taylor Carman, John Haugeland, Sean Dorrance Kelly, Iain Thomson, and Mark Wrathall. He is featured in Tao Ruspoli's film Being in the World. 2Biography Born in Terre Haute, Indiana to Stanley S. and Irene Lederer Dreyfus, Dreyfus was educated at Harvard University, earning three degrees there, with a BA in 1951, an MA in 1952, and a PhD in 1964, under the supervision of Dagfinn Føllesdal. He is considered a leading interpreter of the work of Edmund Husserl, Michel Foucault, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, but especially of Martin Heidegger. He also co-authored Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, translated Merleau-Ponty's Sense and Non-Sense, and authored the controversial 1972 book What Computers Can't Do, revised first in 1979, and then again in 1992 with a new introduction as What Computers Still Can't D