Skillful Coping: Essays on the phenomenology of everyday perception and action ISBN: 9780191784224 Platform/Publisher: Oxford Academic / Oxford University Press Digital rights:Users: Unlimited; Printing: Unlimited; Download: Unlimited Subjects: Philosophy of Mind History of Western Philosophy;
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.
Hubert Lederer Dreyfus was born in Terre Haute, Indiana on October 15, 1929. He received a bachelor's degree in philosophy in 1951, a master's degree in 1952, and a doctorate in 1964 from Harvard University. He taught at Brandeis University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology before joining the philosophy department at the University of California, Berkeley in 1968.
He wrote or co-wrote numerous books during his lifetime including Alchemy and Artificial Intelligence, What Computers Can't Do: A Critique of Artificial Reason, Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics written with Paul Rabinow, Mind Over Machine: The Power of Human Intuition and Expertise in the Era of the Computer, What Computers Still Can't Do, Philosophy: The Latest Answers to the Oldest Questions, All Things Shining: Reading the Western Classics to Find Meaning in a Secular Age written with Sean D. Kelly, and Skillful Coping: Essays on the Everyday Phenomenology of Everyday Perception and Action. He and Mark Wrathall edited numerous guides devoted to existentialism, phenomenology, and Heidegger's philosophy. He died of cancer on April 22, 2017 at the age of 87.
