Dreyfus on Metaphysics and Phenomenology

Hubert Dreyfus (age 85)

Hubert Lederer Dreyfus is an American philosopher and professor of philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley. His interests include phenomenology, existentialism and the philosophy of both psychology and literature, as well as the philosophical implications of artificial intelligence.

Dreyfus is well known for making the work of continental philosophers, especially Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Michel Foucault, intelligible to analytically trained philosophers.

Dreyfus is especially known for his exegesis of Martin Heidegger. Dreyfus considers Heidegger's Being and Time (Sein und zeit) to be one of the most important philosophical works of the twentieth century. It is both a systematization of the existential insights of Kierkegaard and Nietzsche and a radicalization of Husserl's phenomenological account of intentionality. What results is an original interpretation of the human condition leading to an account of the nature and limitations of philosophical and scientific theory. This account has important implications for psychology, anthropology and sociology.

Here is an interview with Hubert Dreyfus on Metaphysics and Phenomenology.


Related reading: The Story of Ontology; Crash Course on Phenomenology