In Memoriam: Hubert Dreyfus

Hubert L. Dreyfus, for nearly 50 years a professor of philosophy at UC Berkeley, died this past Saturday.

As many will know, Dreyfus was an early critic of artificial intelligence and an influential interpreter of Martin Heidegger and other phenomenologists. More recently he challenged John McDowell’s conceptualist accounts of perception and action with arguments that drew on his reading of Merleau-Ponty and longstanding interests in the phenomenology of skill. He will be sorely missed.

For more on Bert’s life, his teaching, and what made his approach to philosophy so revolutionary, here is a lengthy obituary by his student Sean Dorrance Kelly.

3. The mind needs to think about things outside itself

This post is about justification: the justification of perceptual demonstrative beliefs by uptake from perception, and of many of the beliefs we express using proper names by uptake from testimony. What I’m about to suggest is perhaps a little surprising. But I also suggest that extant attempts to explain how …

2. Reference and Justification

In my first post I sketched an argument for a principle connecting aboutness and justification. Here is the sketch version again as a little graphic: The resulting principle, which I call in the book ‘Reference and Justification’, brings out the significance for accounts of aboutness of the fact that justification is …

1. The Theory of Reference is Retro-chic

Remember the causo-descriptivist wars? If your education was anything like mine, at some point you were walked across the old battlefield and shown some of the main sights: early naïve descriptivism about proper names; its cluster theoretic successor; Kripke’s attack on descriptivism in Naming and Necessity; his causal inheritance picture; …

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