Hubert Dreyfus is one of the foremost advocates of European philosophy in the anglophone world. His clear, jargon-free interpretations of the leading thinkers of the European tradition of philosophy have done a great deal to erase the analytic–Continental divide. But Dreyfus is not just an influential interpreter of Continental philosophers; he is a creative, iconoclastic thinker in his own right. Drawing on the work of Heidegger, Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, Foucault, and Kierkegaard, Dreyfus makes significant contributions to contemporary conversations about mind, authenticity, technology, nihilism, modernity and postmodernity, art, scientific realism, and religion. This volume collects thirteen of Dreyfus’s most influential essays, each of which interprets, develops, and extends the insights of his predecessors working in phenomenological and existential philosophy. The essays exemplify a distinctive feature of his approach to philosophy, namely the way his work inextricably intertwines the interpretation of texts with his own analysis and description of the phenomena at issue. In fact, these two tasks—textual exegesis and phenomenological description—are for Dreyfus necessarily dependent on each other. In approaching philosophy in this way, Dreyfus is an heir to Heidegger’s own historically oriented style of phenomenology.
