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• PART I. AUTHENTICITY AND EVERYDAYNESS
• PART II. HERMENEUTIC REALISM
• PART III. HISTORICAL WORLDS
• PART IV. NIHILISM AND THE TECHNOLOGICAL AGE.
• (source: Nielsen Book Data)

This volume presents a selection of Hubert Dreyfus's pioneering work in bringing phenomenology and existentialism to bear on the philosophical and scientific study of the mind. Each of the thirteen essays interprets, develops, and extends the insights of his predecessors working in the European philosophical tradition. One of Dreyfus' central contributions to reading the historical canon of philosophy comes from his recognition that great philosophers help us to understand the "background practices" of a culture - the practices that shape and embody our most basic understanding of ourselves and the things and situations we encounter in our world. Background practices are all too often overlooked completely, or else their importance is misunderstood. Each chapter in this volume shows in one way or another how a broad range of philosophical topics can only be properly understood when we recognize how they are grounded in the background practices that shape our lives and give meaning to our activities, our tasks, our normative commitments, our aims and our goals.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

• PART I. AUTHENTICITY AND EVERYDAYNESS
• PART II. HERMENEUTIC REALISM
• PART III. HISTORICAL WORLDS
• PART IV. NIHILISM AND THE TECHNOLOGICAL AGE.
• (source: Nielsen Book Data)

This volume presents a selection of Hubert Dreyfus's pioneering work in bringing phenomenology and existentialism to bear on the philosophical and scientific study of the mind. Each of the thirteen essays interprets, develops, and extends the insights of his predecessors working in the European philosophical tradition. One of Dreyfus' central contributions to reading the historical canon of philosophy comes from his recognition that great philosophers help us to understand the "background practices" of a culture - the practices that shape and embody our most basic understanding of ourselves and the things and situations we encounter in our world. Background practices are all too often overlooked completely, or else their importance is misunderstood. Each chapter in this volume shows in one way or another how a broad range of philosophical topics can only be properly understood when we recognize how they are grounded in the background practices that shape our lives and give meaning to our activities, our tasks, our normative commitments, our aims and our goals.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

• Frontmatter
• Contents
• Preface
• ONE. A Picture Held Us Captive
• TWO. Escaping the Picture
• THREE. Checking Beliefs
• FOUR. Contact Theory: The Place of the Preconceptual
• FIVE. Embodied Understanding
• SIX. Fusing Horizons
• SEVEN. Realism Retrieved
• EIGHT. Plural Realism
• Index

For Descartes, knowledge exists as ideas in the mind that represent the world. In a radical critique, Hubert Dreyfus and Charles Taylor argue that knowledge consists of much more than the representations we formulate in our minds. They affirm our direct contact with reality-both the physical and the social world-and our shared understanding of it

• A picture held us captive
• Escaping the picture
• Checking beliefs
• Contact theory: the place of the pre-conceptual
• Embodied understanding
• Fusing horizons
• Realism retrieved
• Plural realism.

"A picture held us captive, " writes Wittgenstein in the Philosophical Investigations, describing the powerful image of mind that underlies the modern epistemological tradition from Descartes onward. Retrieving Realism offers a radical critique of the Cartesian epistemic picture that has captivated philosophy for too long and restores a realist view affirming our direct access to the everyday world and to the physical universe. According to Descartes, knowledge exists in the form of ideas in the mind that purportedly represent the world. This "mediational" epistemology-internal ideas mediating external reality-continues to exert a grip on Western thought, and even philosophers such as Quine, Rorty, and Davidson who have claimed to refute Descartes remain imprisoned within its regime. As Hubert Dreyfus and Charles Taylor show, knowledge consists of much more than the explicit representations we formulate. We gain knowledge of the world through bodily engagement with it-by handling things, moving among them, responding to them-and these forms of knowing cannot be understood in mediational terms. Dreyfus and Taylor also contest Descartes's privileging of the individual mind, arguing that much of our understanding of the world is necessarily shared. Once we deconstruct Cartesian mediationalism, the problems that Hume, Kant, and many of our contemporaries still struggle with-trying to prove the existence of objects beyond our representations-fall away, as does the motivation for nonrealist doctrines. We can then begin to describe the background everyday world we are absorbed in and the universe of natural kinds discovered by science.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

• A picture held us captive
• Escaping the picture
• Checking beliefs
• Contact theory: the place of the pre-conceptual
• Embodied understanding
• Fusing horizons
• Realism retrieved
• Plural realism.

"A picture held us captive, " writes Wittgenstein in the Philosophical Investigations, describing the powerful image of mind that underlies the modern epistemological tradition from Descartes onward. Retrieving Realism offers a radical critique of the Cartesian epistemic picture that has captivated philosophy for too long and restores a realist view affirming our direct access to the everyday world and to the physical universe. According to Descartes, knowledge exists in the form of ideas in the mind that purportedly represent the world. This "mediational" epistemology-internal ideas mediating external reality-continues to exert a grip on Western thought, and even philosophers such as Quine, Rorty, and Davidson who have claimed to refute Descartes remain imprisoned within its regime. As Hubert Dreyfus and Charles Taylor show, knowledge consists of much more than the explicit representations we formulate. We gain knowledge of the world through bodily engagement with it-by handling things, moving among them, responding to them-and these forms of knowing cannot be understood in mediational terms. Dreyfus and Taylor also contest Descartes's privileging of the individual mind, arguing that much of our understanding of the world is necessarily shared. Once we deconstruct Cartesian mediationalism, the problems that Hume, Kant, and many of our contemporaries still struggle with-trying to prove the existence of objects beyond our representations-fall away, as does the motivation for nonrealist doctrines. We can then begin to describe the background everyday world we are absorbed in and the universe of natural kinds discovered by science.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

• Introduction: Hubert Dreyfus and the Phenomenology of Human Intelligence
• SECTION ONE: THE PHENOMENOLOGY OF SKILLS
• 1. From Socrates to Expert Systems: The Limits of Calculative Rationality (with Stuart E. Dreyfus) (1985)
• SECTION TWO: INTENTIONALITY AND MIND
• 2. The Perceptual Noema: Gurwitsch's Crucial Contribution (1972)
• 3. Heidegger's Critique of the Husserl/Searle Account of Intentionality (1993)
• 4. Todes's Account of Nonconceptual Perceptual Knowledge and Its Relation to Thought (2001)
• 5. Overcoming the Myth of the Mental: How Philosophers Can Profit from the Phenomenology of Everyday Expertise (2005)
• SECTION THREE: PHENOMENOLOGY AND THE HUMAN SCIENCES
• 6. Holism and Hermeneutics (1980)
• 7. The Primacy of Phenomenology over Logical Analysis (2001)
• 8. From Depth Psychology to Breadth Psychology: A Phenomenological Approach to Psychopathology (with Jerome Wakefield) (1988)
• 9. What is Moral Maturity? Towards A Phenomenology of Ethical Expertise (with Stuart E. Dreyfus) (1992)
• SECTION FOUR: EMBODIED COPING AND ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
• 10. Making a Mind Versus Modeling the Brain: Artificial Intelligence Back at a Branchpoint (with Stuart E. Dreyfus) (1988)
• 11. Merleau-Ponty and Recent Cognitive Science (2004)
• 12. Why Heideggerian AI Failed and How Fixing it Would Require Making it More Heideggerian (2007)
• Bibliography
• Index.
• (source: Nielsen Book Data)

For fifty years Hubert Dreyfus has addressed an astonishing range of issues in the fields of phenomenology, existentialism, cognitive science, and the philosophical study of mind. Dreyfus has inspired a whole generation of philosophers as he has creatively drawn on and clearly articulated the seminal works of thinkers like Kierkegaard, Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty and Foucault. This volume presents a selection of Dreyfus's most influential essays on mind and action. The book begins with a model of skillful engaged human action, which informs much of Dreyfus's philosophy, and was developed in collaboration with Stuart Dreyfus. The volume then presents articles developing a critique of the representational model of the mind in analytical philosophy of mind and mainstream cognitive science. Dreyfus argues that representational models of mind offer an impoverished and distorting account of human engagement with the world. The chapters show this by addressing issues in philosophy of mind and the cognitive sciences through the skill model.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

• Our contemporary nihilism
• David Foster Wallace's nihilism
• Homer's polytheism
• From Aeschylus to Augustine : monotheism on the rise
• From Dante to Kant : the attractions and dangers of autonomy
• Fanaticism, polytheism, and Melville's "evil art"
• Conclusion : lives worth living in a secular age.

A sense of certainty and unhesitating confidence is rare in the contemporary world. An unrelenting flow of choices confronts us at nearly every moment of our lives, and if we are honest about it then most of us will admit that we waver in the face of them. Dreyfus and Kelly examine some of the greatest books in the Western Canon to explain that the burden of choice is essentially a modern problem to which there is an age old solution. Dreyfus and Kelly explain the huge jump from Homer's polytheistic world to the monotheistic one in which Dante wrote his Divine Comedy and Martin Luther wrote his ninety-five theses. They then take the reader forward to the rejection of this Christian ideal, to the Superman of Nietzsche and further onto the spiritual cornucopia of Herman Melville's Moby Dick. Arriving at the ennui and emptiness that pervades our modern world in which the work of Elizabeth Gilbert and David Foster Wallace arose, Dreyfus and Kelly offer a new-and very old-way to embrace the world, a fresh way to live a meaningful life in a secular world.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

• Introduction
• 1. The Hype about Hyperlinks
• 2. How Far is Distance Learning from Education?
• 3. Disemobied Telepresence and the Remoteness of the Real
• 4. Nihilism on the Information Highway
• 5. Embodiment and Meaning in the Metaverse? Conclusion.
• (source: Nielsen Book Data)

Can the internet solve the problem of mass education, and bring human beings to a new level of community? Drawing on a diverse array of thinkers from Plato to Kierkegaard, "On the Internet" agues that there is much in common between the disembodied, free floating web and Descartes' separation of mind and body. Dreyfus also shows how Kierkegaard's insights into the origins of a media-obsessed public anticipate the web surfer, blogger and chat room. Drawing on studies of the isolation experienced by many internet users and the insights of philosopher such as Descartes and Kierkegaard, Dreyfus shows how the internet's privatisation of experience ignores essential human capacities such as trust, moods, risk, shared local concerns and commitment. The second edition includes a brand new chapter on 'Second Life' and is revised throughout.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

• Introduction
• 1. The hype about hyper-links
• 2. How far is Distance-learning from Education?
• 3. Disembodied presence and the remoteness of the real
• 4. Nihilism on Line: Anonymity vs Commitment in the Present Age Conclusion.
• (source: Nielsen Book Data)

This work is a clear discussion of the promises of the Internet. Can it really bring humanity to a new level of community and democracy and solve the problems of mass education? Hubert Dreyfus, a writer on philosophy and technology, brings a philosopher's eye to bear on an issue that affects us all. Drawing on a diverse array of thinkers including Descartes and Kierkegaard, Dreyfus draws parallels between the Internet and the birth of a media-obsessed public in the 18th century and the Enlightenment quest for a universal, abstract knowledge. He shows how the Internet ignores essential human capacities such as trust, moods, risk, shared local concerns and commitment. He also uses compelling examples from the experience of teaching to show what "interactive" education leaves out.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

• Ten years of research in artificial intelligence (1957-1967)
• Cognitive simulation (1957-1962)
• Semantic information processing (1962-1967)
• Assumptions underlying persistent optimism
• Biological assumption
• Psychological assumption
• Epistemological assumption
• Ontological assumption
• Alternatives to the traditional assumptions
• The role of the body in intelligent behavior
• The situation: orderly behavior without recourse to rules
• The situation as a function of human needs
• Conclusion: the scope and limits of artificial reason
• The limits of artificial intelligence
• The future of artificial intelligence.

When it was first published in 1972, Hubert Dreyfus's manifesto on the inherent inability of disembodied machines to mimic higher mental functions caused an uproar in the artificial intelligence community. The world has changed since then. Today it is clear that "good old-fashioned AI, " based on the idea of using symbolic representations to produce general intelligence, is in decline (although several believers still pursue its pot of gold), and the focus of the AI community has shifted to more complex models of the mind. It has also become more common for AI researchers to seek out and study philosophy. For this edition of his now classic book, Dreyfus has added a lengthy new introduction outlining these changes and assessing the paradigms of connectionism and neural networks that have transformed the field. At a time when researchers were proposing grand plans for general problem solvers and automatic translation machines, Dreyfus predicted that they would fail because their conception of mental functioning was naive, and he suggested that they would do well to acquaint themselves with modern philosophical approaches to human being. "What Computers Still Can't Do" was widely attacked but quietly studied. Dreyfus's arguments are still provocative and focus our attention once again on what it is that makes human beings unique.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

• Part 1 Ten years of research in artificial intelligence (1957-1967): phase I (1957-1962) cognitive simulation - analysis of work in language translation, problem solving, and pattern recognition, the underlying significance of failure to achieve predicted results
• phase II (1962-1967) semantic information processing - analysis of semantic information processing programmes, significance of current difficulties. Part 2 Assumptions underlying persistent optimism: the biological assumption
• the psychological assumption - empirical evidence for the psychological assumption - critique of the scientific methodology of cognitive simulation, "A Priori" arguments for the psychological assumptions
• the epistemological assumption - a mistaken argument from the success of physics, a mistaken argument from the success of modern linguistics
• the ontological assumption. Part 3 Alternatives to the traditional assumptions: the role of the body in intelligent behaviour
• the situation - orderly behaviour without recourse to rulels
• the situation as a function of human needs. Part 4 Conclusion - the scope and limits of artificial reason: the limits of artificial intelligence - the future of artificial intelligence.
• (source: Nielsen Book Data)

When it was first published in 1972, Hubert Dreyfus's manifesto on the inherent inability of disembodied machines to mimic higher mental functions caused an uproar in the artificial intelligence community. Today it is clear that "good old-fashioned AI", based on the idea of using symbolic representations to produce general intelligence, is in decline (although several believers still pursue its pot of gold), and the focus of the AI community has shifted to more complex models of the mind. It has also become more common for AI researchers to seek out and study philosophy. For this edition, Dreyfus has added a lengthy new introduction outlining these changes and assessing the paradigms of connectionism and neural networks that have transformed the field. At a time when researchers were proposing grand plans for general problem solvers and automatic translation machines, Dreyfus predicted that they would fail because their conception of mental functioning was naive, and he suggested that they would do well to acquaint themselves with modern philosophical approaches to human beings. "What Computers Can't Do" was widely attacked but quietly studied. Dreyfus' arguments are still provocative and focus our attention once again on what it is that makes human beings unique.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

Essays discuss the themes of worldliness, affectedness, understanding, and the care-structure found in Heidegger's work on the nature of existence.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

A detailed account of the experience of learning to improvise on the piano. Ways of the Hand tells the story of how David Sudnow learned to improvise jazz on the piano. Because he had been trained as an ethnographer and social psychologist, Sudnow was attentive to what he experienced in ways that other novice pianists are not. The result, first published in 1978 and now considered by many to be a classic, was arguably the finest and most detailed account of skill development ever published. Looking back after more than twenty years, Sudnow was struck by the extent to which he had allowed his academic background to shape the book's language. He realized that he could now do a much better job of describing his experiences in a way that would not require facility with formal social science and philosophical discourse. The result is a revised version of the book that carries the same intellectual energy as the original but is accessible to a much wider audience.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)