Background
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. His Being-in-the-World: A Commentary on Heidegger's "Being and Time," Division 1, is thought by many who have attempted to teach Heidegger to undergraduates to be the authoritative text on Heidegger's most significant contribution to philosophy. 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 Do. While spending most of his teaching career at Berkeley, Professor Dreyfus has also taught at Brandeis University (1957 to 1959), the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (from 1960 to 1968), the University of Frankfurt, and Hamilton College. His philosophical work has influenced Richard Rorty, Charles Taylor, John Searle, and his former student John Haugeland, among others. His critical comments on the existential phenomenology and subsequent dialectical philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre may well have played a significant role in the demise of Sartre's influence on recent thought.
In 1965, while teaching at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dreyfus published "Alchemy and Artificial Intelligence", an attack on the work of Allen Newell and Herbert A. Simon, two of the leading researchers in the field of Artificial Intelligence. Dreyfus not only questioned the results they had so far obtained, but he also criticized their basic presupposition (that intelligence consists of the manipulation of physical symbols according to formal rules), and argued that the AI research program was doomed to failure. In 1965, he spent time at the Rand Corporation, while work on artificial intelligence was in progress there.
In addition to criticizing artificial intelligence, Dreyfus is well known for making the work of continental philosophers, especially Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Michel Foucault, intelligible to analytically trained philosophers.
His younger brother, Stuart Dreyfus, earned a Ph.D. in applied mathematics and is a professor of industrial engineering and operations research at the University of California, Berkeley.
Read more about this topic: Hubert Dreyfus
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