Hubert Dreyfus

Hubert Dreyfus (1929-2017) was an American philosopher and professor at the University of California, Berkeley, whose interests included phenomenology, existentialism and the philosophy of psychology and of literature, as well as the philosophical implications of artificial intelligence. He was a widely followed teacher whose recorded Berkeley course on man, God and society in Western literature reached many listeners outside the university. In education he is known for the model of skill acquisition that he proposed with his brother Stuart Dreyfus, which describes how a learner moves from rule-following novice to intuitive expert. He spoke on robots, artificial intelligence and existential phenomenology at the Berkeley Center for New Media in 2014 and died in Berkeley on April 22, 2017, aged 87.