mentor of yours unfortunately no longer with us you wrote with him the book titled all things shining reading the western classics to find meaning in a secular age first can you maybe speak about who that man was what you learned from him and then we could maybe ask how do we find through the classics meaning in a secular age okay so bert dreyfuss was a very important philosopher of the late NUMBER_TOKENth early NUMBER_TOKENst century he he died in um NUMBER_TOKEN about a little over four years ago uh he was my teacher i met him in NUMBER_TOKEN when i went away to graduate school in berkeley that's where he taught he plays an interesting and important role in the history of philosophy in america because uh in a period when most philosophers in america and in the english-speaking world were not taking seriously NUMBER_TOKENth century french and german philosophy he was and he was really probably the most important english-speaking interpreter of heidegger the the german philosopher that we're talking about we've been talking about he was an incredible teacher a lot of his influence came through his teaching and one of the amazing things about him as a teacher was his um sort of mix of intellectual humility with sort of deep insightful authority and he would stand up in front of a class of NUMBER_TOKEN students he taught huge classes because people love to go see him and i taught for him for many years and say you know i've been reading this text for NUMBER_TOKEN years but the question you asked is one i've never asked and it would be true like he would he would he would find in what people said things that were surprising and new to him and that's humility actually that is listening to the world absolutely absolutely he was always ready to be surprised by something that someone said yeah and there's something astonishing about that so his influence was you know for people who didn't know him through his interpretations of these texts he wrote about a huge range of stuff but for people who did know him it was through his presence it was through the way he carried himself in in his life and uh so in any case that that's who he was we i graduated after many years as a graduate student i i didn't start in philosophy i started in math math and computer science actually and then i did a lot of work in computational neuroscience for a few years it's a fascinating journey we'll we'll get to it through our friendly conversation about artificial intelligence okay i'm sure because you're you're basically fascinated with the philosophy of mind of the human mind but rooted in a curiosity of mind through the it's artificial through the engineering of mind yeah yeah that's right so bur so bert i mean the reason i was attracted to him actually is is because of his uh to begin with was because of his criticisms of what was called traditional symbolic ai in the NUMBER_TOKENs and NUMBER_TOKENs so i came to berkeley as a graduate student who'd done a lot of math and a lot of computer science a lot of computational neuroscience i i noticed that you had you interview a lot of a lot of people in this world and i had a teacher at brown as an undergraduate uh jim anderson who wrote with jeff hinton a big book on neural networks um so so
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