Hubert Dreyfus

Source: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
Hubert Dreyfus
hermeneutic realism[1][2]

Hubert Lederer Dreyfus (

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. He was widely known for his exegesis of Martin Heidegger, which critics labeled "Dreydegger".[4]

Dreyfus was featured in Tao Ruspoli's film Being in the World (2010),[5] and was among the philosophers interviewed by Bryan Magee for the BBC Television series The Great Philosophers (1987).[6]

The

Professor Hubert Farnsworth is partly named after him, writer Eric Kaplan having been a former student.[3]

Life and career

Dreyfus was born on 15 October 1929, in Terre Haute, Indiana, to Stanley S. and Irene (Lederer) Dreyfus.[7][8]

He attended

Sean D. Kelly records that Dreyfus found the meeting 'disappointing.'[12] Brief mention of it was made by Dreyfus during his 1987 BBC interview with Bryan Magee in remarks that are revealing of both his and Heidegger's opinion of the work of Jean-Paul Sartre.[13][6]

Between 1956 and 1957, Dreyfus undertook research at the

University of Louvain on a Fulbright Fellowship.[10] Towards the end of his stay, his first (jointly authored) paper "Curds and Lions in Don Quijote" would appear in print.[12][14] After acting as an instructor in philosophy at Brandeis University (1957–1959),[8][11] he attended the Ecole Normale Supérieure, Paris, on a French government grant (1959–1960).[10]

From 1960, first as an instructor, then as an assistant and then associate professor, Dreyfus taught philosophy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).[8] In 1964, with his dissertation Husserl's Phenomenology of Perception, he obtained his PhD from Harvard.[10][15] (Due to his knowledge of Husserl, Dagfinn Føllesdal sat on the thesis committee but he has asserted that Dreyfus "was not really my student.")[16] That same year, his co-translation (with his first wife) of Sense and Non-Sense by Maurice Merleau-Ponty was published.[7]

Also in 1964, and whilst still at

Alchemy and Artificial Intelligence, which proved to be the first of a series of papers and books attacking the AI field's claims and assumptions.[17][18] The first edition of What Computers Can't Do would follow in 1972, and this critique of AI (which has been translated into at least ten languages) would establish Dreyfus's public reputation.[9] However, as the editors of his Festschrift noted: "the study and interpretation of 'continental' philosophers... came first in the order of his philosophical interests and influences."[9]

Dreyfus (left) outside his Berkeley home in 1976
Berkeley

In 1968, although he had been granted

UC Berkeley until his last class in December 2016.[3]

Dreyfus was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2001.[19] He was also awarded an honorary doctorate for "his brilliant and highly influential work in the field of artificial intelligence" and his interpretation of twentieth century continental philosophy by Erasmus University.[3]

Dreyfus died on April 22, 2017.[7][12]

His younger brother and sometimes collaborator, Stuart Dreyfus, is a professor emeritus of industrial engineering and operations research at the University of California, Berkeley.

Dreyfus' criticism of AI

Main article: Hubert Dreyfus's views on artificial intelligence

Dreyfus' critique of

symbols
.

Dreyfus claims that the plausibility of the psychological assumption rests on two others: the

intelligence
is the same as formal rule-following, and it's because of the ontological one that they argue that human knowledge consists entirely of internal representations of reality.

On the basis of these two assumptions, workers in the field claim that

scientific psychology is possible, which will detail the 'internal' rules of the human mind, in the same way the laws of physics detail the 'external' laws of the physical world. However, it is this key assumption that Dreyfus denies. In other words, he argues that we cannot now (and never will be able to) understand our own behavior in the same way as we understand objects in, for example, physics or chemistry: that is, by considering ourselves as things whose behaviour can be predicted via 'objective', context free scientific laws. According to Dreyfus, a context-free psychology
is a contradiction in terms.

Dreyfus's arguments against this position are taken from the

hermeneutical tradition (especially the work of Martin Heidegger). Heidegger argued that, contrary to the cognitivist
views (on which AI has been based), our being is in fact highly context-bound, which is why the two context-free assumptions are false. Dreyfus doesn't deny that we can choose to see human (or any) activity as being 'law-governed', in the same way that we can choose to see reality as consisting of indivisible atomic facts... if we wish. But it is a huge leap from that to state that because we want to or can see things in this way that it is therefore an objective fact that they are the case. In fact, Dreyfus argues that they are not (necessarily) the case, and that, therefore, any research program that assumes they are will quickly run into profound theoretical and practical problems. Therefore, the current efforts of workers in the field are doomed to failure.

Dreyfus argues that to get a device or devices with human-like intelligence would require them to have a human-like being-in-the-world and to have bodies more or less like ours, and social acculturation (i.e. a society) more or less like ours. (This view is shared by psychologists in the

embodied psychology (Lakoff and Johnson 1999) and distributed cognition traditions. His opinions are similar to those of robotics researchers such as Rodney Brooks as well as researchers in the field of artificial life
.)

Daniel Crevier writes: "time has proven the accuracy and perceptiveness of some of Dreyfus's comments. Had he formulated them less aggressively, constructive actions they suggested might have been taken much earlier."[20]

Webcasting philosophy

When UC Berkeley and Apple began making a selected number of lecture classes freely available to the public as podcasts beginning around 2006, a recording of Dreyfus teaching a course called "Man, God, and Society in Western Literature – From Gods to God and Back" rose to the 58th most popular webcast on iTunes.[21] These webcasts have attracted the attention of many, including non-academics, to Dreyfus and his subject area.[22]

Works

Books

Festschrift

Select articles

See also

References

  1. ^ Hubert L. Dreyfus, Mark A. Wrathall (eds.), Heidegger Reexamined: Truth, realism, and the history of being, Routledge, 2002, pp. 245, 274, 280
  2. ISBN 978-0-19-879622-0
    .
  3. ^ a b c d e f Anwar, Yasmin (2017-04-25). "Hubert Dreyfus, preeminent philosopher and AI critic, dies at 87". Berkeley News. Retrieved 2019-04-15.
  4. ISBN 978-0-521-51837-6
    .
  5. ^ "BEING IN THE WORLD by Tao Ruspoli @ Brooklyn Film Festival". Retrieved 2019-10-04.
  6. ^
    Magee, Bryan, Dreyfus, Hubert L. Bryan Magee talks to Hubert Dreyfus about Husserl, Heidegger and modern existentialism. [via YouTube] The Great Philosophers
    BBC (1987)
  7. ^
    ISSN 0362-4331
    . Retrieved 2019-04-15.
  8. ^ a b c d e f g "Dreyfus, Hubert L(ederer) 1929-." Contemporary Authors, New Revision Series. Encyclopedia.com. 22 Aug. 2019
  9. ^
    OCLC 62157918.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: others (link
    )
  10. ^
    OCLC 276357640
    .
  11. ^ a b "Professor Hubert Dreyfus Long form CV". sophos.berkeley.edu. Archived from the original on 2019-08-22. Retrieved 2019-08-23.
  12. ^
    Kelly, Sean D. (2017-04-24). Weinberg, Justin (ed.). "Hubert Dreyfus (1929-2017)". Daily Nous
    . Retrieved 2019-04-15.
  13. OL 2043183M. Sartre started out as a Husserlian, and as a phenomenologist he wrote a good novel called Nausea, which is a first-person description of a person's world breaking down. Then he read Heidegger and was converted to what he thought was Heideggerian existentialism. But as a Husserlian and a Frenchman he felt he had to fix up Heidegger and make him more Cartesian. So he starts with the individual conscious subject, but writes about Death, Anxiety, lnauthenticity, Being and Nothing - all the things that Heidegger talks about. The result, Being and Nothingness, is a brilliant misunderstanding of Being and Time
    . If the story that we've been telling is right, Heidegger was precisely trying to free us from our Cartesian assumptions. When I went to visit Heidegger he had Being and Nothingness on his desk, in German translation, and I said, 'So you're reading Sartre?, and he responded, 'How can I even begin to read this muck?' (His word was 'Dreck'.) That's pretty strong, but I think accurate, since if you treat Heidegger as if he were talking about subjects you turn him back into Husserl.
  14. ISSN 0026-7929
    .
  15. OCLC 18179097
    .
  16. ^ Korsnes, C. 2016, A Matter of Perspective: Interview with Dagfinn Føllesdal, Filosofisk supplement, 2/2015
  17. OCLC 921182846
    .
  18. ^ a b Dreyfus, Hubert L. (1965). "Alchemy and Artificial Intelligence". www.rand.org. Retrieved 2019-08-23.
  19. ^ "Book of Members, 1780-2010: Chapter D" (PDF). American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2018-08-09. Retrieved 2011-04-19.
  20. OCLC 26858345
    .
  21. ^ The iPod lecture circuit, Michelle Quinn Los Angeles Times, 24 November 2007, Archived by Wayback Machine
  22. ^ "Episode III: The Life and Death of Hubert Dreyfus · At World's End". atworldsend.co. Retrieved 2019-10-25.
  23. ISSN 0004-3702. Archived from the original
    (PDF) on 2018-07-12.
  24. ^ Starr, Sandy "Nihilism online?", 2001-07031, Spiked, Archived from the original on 2001-11-18 [Review]
  25. New York Review of Books, 2011-04-07, this being followed by 'All Things Shining': An Exchange in NYRB
    on 2011-05-26]
  26. ISSN 1538-1617
    .
  27. ISSN 1538-1617
    .
  28. ISSN 1538-1617
    .
  29. ^ a b Brinkmann, Svend (2010) On the Road with Heidegger: Review of the Festschrift in honor of Hubert Dreyfus PrePrint of published review in: SATS, Volume 3, Issue 1, Pages 175–180, ISSN (Online) 1869-7577, ISSN (Print) 1600-1974
  30. ^ Sean Dorrance Kelly. 2000. Grasping at Straws: Motor Intentionality and the Cognitive Science of Skilled Behavior In Heidegger, Coping, and Cognitive Science: Essays in Honor of Hubert L. Dreyfus - Vol. II, edited by Mark Wrathall and Jeff Malpas, II: Pp. 161–177. Cambridge, MA, USA: MIT Press [Author Copy]

Criticism of AI sources

External links
Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Hubert_Dreyfus&oldid=1218552245"