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Introduction
The purpose of this wiki is to store and cross-reference information concerning the work of philosopher Hubert L. Dreyfus, and particularly how his insights can be applied to our emerging technological culture dominated by computers.
Whooshup Wiki grew out of a discussion group that is partially organized around my Whooshup blog dedicated to following Dreyfus' podcast lectures from UC Berkeley. This is how I first made contact with Dreyfus and his ideas. This wiki, and my interest in Dreyfus, however, is directed specifically toward cataloguing Dreyfus' contributions and what they mean for computer science and its spawn: technological culture awash in computerized prosthetics to everyday life, such as this wonderful wiki tool I'm using to deconstruct it!
Full Disclosure: Much about the internet is anonymous. This wiki is not. It has been developed, and is maintained, by me. Please email if you have any questions, or would like to contribute.
Why Dreyfus?
He challenges this computer era and us as computer-oriented beings. Not the computer as a mere tool - he's fine with seeing in it an enhanced calculator or typesetting machine. He challenges the computer as an end in itself, as an intellectual ideal, as a postmodern lifestyle. He asserts that computers do not add anything essential to human beings; if anything, they threaten to cover up much that is inestimably valuable. Intellectually, to absorb this strong critique and still engage in computer work is, for me, to poise on a steep mountain overlook rather than tramp around hacking vines in an electronic jungle.
Hubert Dreyfus is the only contemporary thinker I have encountered who has strongly stated and defended the Continental existentialist case against rationalism and the liberal enlightenment stance, while maintaining and defending an essentially American pragmatic realism, and displaying an intellectual honesty that avoids the polemics and extremist smoke-bombs endemic to the European movement. He has treated problems of science and technology on the one hand (how we now make our world), and religion and ethics on the other (how we now should make our world), with consistent, questing, challenging, sympathetic strokes, which almost always go back to, or back through, the philosopher Martin Heidegger.
Heidegger was largely unknown in the States when Dreyfus began his project in the early 1960's. At the close of the 20th century, the opinion gathered, not without dispute, that Heidegger and Wittgenstein were the two outstanding thinkers of the century. Dreyfus is recognized as the foremost anglophone exponent of Heidegger, who he sees as very much in synch with later Wittgenstein. Although Dreyfus has seriously criticized some of Heidegger's positions, and has reached past him to better understand Heidegger's existentialist forerunners such as Kierkegaard, Nietzsche and Dostoevsky, it remains certain that to understand Dreyfus is in large part to understand Heidegger's impact on the human intellectual framework, which Dreyfus channels and interprets for us.
Dreyfus is also noted for his accessible style. Whereas the most erudite professor and skillful translator has difficulty understanding Martin Heidegger's writings, Dreyfus' commentary on that work, either written in books and papers, or spoken in his recorded classroom lectures, is amazingly accessible to anyone who has the patience to sit down and absorb it. This humble ability may be his greatest accomplishment.
We have, in the briefest review above, a sequence of superlatives. If we are to "stand on the shoulders of giants" here and now, at the beginning of a doubtful and technologically overwhelmed new century, this is the spot I would choose to stand.
