ABSTRACT
Hubert Lederer Dreyfus (b. 1929) is an American philosopher, and as of this writing is Professor of Philosophy in the Graduate School at the University of California, Berkeley, USA. He received a Ph.D. in Philosophy from Harvard University in 1964. He is known chiefly for his interpretation of Martin Heidegger (1889-1976), as well as his work on the nature and limits of artificial intelligence, and his two chief works of philosophy are What Computers Can’t Do: A Critique of Artificial Reason,1 and Being-in-the-World: A Commentary on Heidegger’s Being and Time, Division I.2 More recently, he has made a major contribution to philosophical studies of the Internet with his book, On the Internet.3 In almost all of his philosophical work, Dreyfus is most deeply influenced by what he takes to be Heidegger’s understanding of the self, and a Heideggerian understanding of learning and skill acquisition (developed extensively by Dreyfus with his brother, Stuart Dreyfus, in a series of articles and one book, Mind Over Machine: The Power of Human Intuitive Expertise in the Era of the Computer4). This Heideggerian concern for the threat information technologies pose to the possibility of an authentic human self is no less present in Dreyfus’ use of and work on Kierkegaard than it is in his more explicit considerations of Heidegger, information technology, and skill acquisition.
