page_title: Hubert Dreyfus
section_title: Life and career
hierarchical_section_title: Hubert Dreyfus / Life and career
context_page_description: 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.
context_section_description: Dreyfus was born on 15 October 1929, in Terre Haute, Indiana, to Stanley S. and Irene (Lederer) Dreyfus.
  He attended Harvard University from 1947. With a senior honors thesis on Causality and Quantum Theory (for which W. V. O. Quine was the main examiner) 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 (as he was again in 1954 and 1956). 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 (jointly authored) paper "Curds and Lions in Don Quijote" would appear in print. After acting as an instructor in philosophy at Brandeis University (1957–1959), he attended the Ecole Normale Supérieure, Paris, on a French government grant (1959–1960).
  From 1960, first as an instructor, then as and assistant and then associate professor, Dreyfus taught philosophy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). In 1964, with his dissertation Husserl’s Phenomenology of Perception, he obtained his PhD from Harvard. (Due to his knowledge of Husserl, Dagfinn Føllesdal sat on the thesis committee but he has asserted that Dreyfus "was not really my student.")  That same year, his co-translation (with his first wife) 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 (AI). 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 (which has been translated into at least ten languages) 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."
  Berkeley
  In 1968, although he had been granted tenure, Dreyfus left MIT and became an associate professor of philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley (winning, that same year, the Harbison Prize for Outstanding Teaching). 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 held, from 1999, a joint appointment in the rhetoric department). 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.
caption: Dreyfus (left) outside his Berkeley home in 1976.
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