ABSTRACT
Hubert Dreyfus’s work in the phenomenology of agency is distinctive for the privileged and central position he gives to readers ability to navigate the everyday world. Drawing on the existential-phenomenological tradition—particularly the work of Martin Heidegger and Maurice Merleau-Ponty—Dreyfus characterizes skillful embodied engagement with the world (skillful coping) as the paradigmatic instance of human intelligence and agency. One of Dreyfus’s central claims is that the complex understanding involved in skillfully performing apparently ordinary tasks need not be highly reflective. It is through his engagement with Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty that Dreyfus develops his account of skillful coping as a critique of the philosophical tradition, which he sees as intellectualistic and deliberative in a way that distorts our understanding of human existence. Dreyfus thinks the philosophical tradition as a whole has long relied on an overly intellectualized account of human existence.
