Hubert Dreyfus


Hubert Lederer Dreyfus 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. He was known for his exegesis of Martin Heidegger, which critics labeled "Dreydegger".
Dreyfus is featured in Tao Ruspoli's film Being in the World , and was amongst the philosophers interviewed by Bryan Magee for the BBC Television series The Great Philosophers .
The Futurama character Professor Hubert Farnsworth is partly named after him, writer Eric Kaplan having been a former student.

Life and career

Dreyfus was born on 15 October 1929, in Terre Haute, Indiana, to Stanley S. and Irene Dreyfus.
He attended Harvard University from 1947. With a senior honors thesis on Causality and Quantum Theory he was awarded a BA summa cum laude in 1951 and joined Phi Beta Kappa. He was awarded an MA in 1952. He was a Teaching Fellow at Harvard in 1952-1953. Then, on a Harvard Sheldon traveling fellowship, Dreyfus studied at the University of Freiburg over 1953–1954. During this time he had an interview with Martin Heidegger. Sean D. Kelly records that Dreyfus found the meeting 'disappointing.' 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.
Over 1956 and 1957, on a Fulbright Fellowship, Dreyfus undertook research at the Husserl Archives at the University of Louvain. Towards the end of his stay, his first paper "Curds and Lions in Don Quijote" would appear in print. After acting as an instructor in philosophy at Brandeis University, he attended the Ecole Normale Supérieure, Paris, on a French government grant.
From 1960, first as an instructor, then as and assistant and then associate professor, Dreyfus taught philosophy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In 1964, with his dissertation Husserl’s Phenomenology of Perception, he obtained his PhD from Harvard. That same year, his co-translation of Sense and Non-Sense by Maurice Merleau-Ponty was published.
Also in 1964, and whilst still at MIT, he was employed as a consultant by the RAND Corporation to review the work of Allen Newell and Herbert A. Simon in the field of artificial intelligence. This resulted in the publication, in 1965, of the "famously combative" 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. The first edition of What Computers Can't Do would follow in 1972 and this critique of AI would establish Dreyfus's public reputation. 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."
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In 1968, although he had been granted tenure, Dreyfus left MIT and became an associate professor of philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley. In 1972 he was promoted to full professor. Though Dreyfus retired from his chair in 1994. he continued as professor of philosophy in the Graduate School. And he continued to teach philosophy at UC Berkeley until his last class in December 2016.
Dreyfus was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2001. 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.
Dreyfus died on April 22, 2017.
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

Dreyfus' critique of artificial intelligence concerns what he considers to be the four primary assumptions of AI research. The first two assumptions are what he calls the "biological" and "psychological" assumptions. The biological assumption is that the brain is analogous to computer hardware and the mind is analogous to computer software. The psychological assumption is that the mind works by performing discrete computations on discrete representations or symbols.
Dreyfus claims that the plausibility of the psychological assumption rests on two others: the epistemological and ontological assumptions. The epistemological assumption is that all activity can be formalized in the form of predictive rules or laws. The ontological assumption is that reality consists entirely of a set of mutually independent, atomic facts. It's because of the epistemological assumption that workers in the field argue that 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 cognition is the manipulation of internal symbols by internal rules, and that, therefore, human behaviour is, to a large extent, context free. Therefore, a truly 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 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 phenomenological and hermeneutical tradition. Heidegger argued that, contrary to the cognitivist views, 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 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 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 more or less like ours.
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."

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. These webcasts have attracted the attention of many, including non-academics, to Dreyfus and his subject area.

Works

Books