Dreyfus, Hubert

Hubert is Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley. He is considered a leading interpreter of continental, existential, phenomenological philosophers such as Husserl, Foucault, Merleau-Ponty, and especially Martin Heidegger. Hubert is also known for criticizing strong Artificial Intelligence (“AI”) in his popular books, What Computers Can’t Do and What Computers Still Can’t Do. He not only questioned the results that leading AI researchers had thus far produced, but he also criticized their basic presupposition (that intelligence consists of the manipulation of physical symbols according to formal rules), and he pronounced that the AI research program was doomed to failure. His critique actually helped AI to become more context-bound as opposed to its original context-free assumptions of early cognitive science. His recent work focuses on aspects of the philosophy of religion; he teaches a course called "From gods to God and back," which tries to explain and justify polytheism starting from the Odyssey and ending with Moby Dick.