Skillful Coping ─ Essays on the Phenomenology of Everyday Perception and Action

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 L. Dreyfus is Professor of Philosophy in the Graduate School at the University of California, Berkeley. His research interests bridge the Analytic and Continental traditions in twentieth-century philosophy focusing on non-conceptual intentional content in skilled action and in perception. He is author of What Computers (Still) Can't Do (MIT, 1992) and Being-in-the-World: A Commentary on Heidegger's Being and Time, Division I (MIT, 1991).

Mark A. Wrathall is Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Riverside. He is the author of Heidegger and Unconcealment: Truth, Language and History (CUP, 2010) and the editor of The Cambridge Companion to Heidegger's Being and Time (CUP, 2013).