Professor, Philosophy
B.A., Harvard University
Ph.D., Harvard University
Professor of Philosophy in the Graduate School, Hubert L. Dreyfus earned both his B.A and his Ph.D. at Harvard. He has taught at Berkeley since 1972, including two courses a year since his retirement in 1994. In addition to a long list of awards and honors, he was recognized by the campus in 2003 with the Rhoda H. Goldman Awards for Distinguished Faculty Advising of Undergraduates. His scholarly interests cover a wide range, from existentialism in literature and film, and cognitive science, to Kierkegaard, Heidegger and Foucault. Of his many books, the latest is On the Internet (May 2001). The Committee was impressed by the way Dreyfus gets his students to think and to dig: "He doesn't give them the convention wisdom; he gives them something longer lasting, an ability to think about the subject." Says a former undergraduate, now a professor of Philosophy: "Bert has a fantastic nose for fascinating issues, and he shows his students how to think those issues through carefully and honestly. He is not only a gripping and imaginative lecturer, but a brilliant discussion leader as well."
Statement of Teaching Philosophy
My ultimate goal in my teaching is learning, and for this I need all the help I can get, especially from undergraduate students who have no preconceptions about the meaning of the texts we are studying. Since I see my lectures not primarily as occasions to teach but rather as opportunities to learn, I take students' questions and objections as essential to the course of the lecture rather than as a distraction from it. A question often provides the chance to see the issue we're learning about in a new light. The more help the better; this requires teaching a class of 250 students (500 in the old days when existentialism was in fashion) as if it were a discussion section.
The mood in the room makes a huge difference to me. To begin with, it's essential, if one is to teach a large lecture course as if it were a seminar, that students can see and hear each other, not just me.
Since learning is what is crucial, not presenting some body of material, I'm ready to take every intervention, even every interruption, seriously and follow wherever it leads, even if I don't get a chance to present the material I've prepared for the day.
If one is to learn, one has to make mistakes and be willing to acknowledge them. Therefore, I feel that things are going really well when I can begin a lecture by repenting the mistakes I made in the previous one, if possible naming and thanking the students who have convinced me that my claims were mistaken.
For the past 20 years I've made audio tapes (now audio files on the course website) of each lecture so that students can catch up on classes they have missed and can review the class discussion when writing their papers.
Each day before I give a lecture on a certain topic, I feel compelled to listen to the tape of the last time I gave that lecture. I feel elated at the moments when things went well and the students and I learned something together, and discouraged when a long discussion led nowhere. Somehow this helps me get in the right mood and to profit from past successes and failures.
The primary reward for all this effort is certainly sharing with students the pleasure of learning from the greatest thinkers of all times by prolonged and risky engagement with them. But that would not be rewarding unless what we learned was relevant to our lives. That's why it is especially satisfyting to have former students come up to me in the supermarket or send e-mail, as they frequently do, saying that what they learned in one of my courses has changed their lives.