A massive trove of legendary lectures by philosopher Hubert L Dreyfus is currently confined to aging cassette tapes in a closet in the Berkeley Hills. With your support, we can build a professionally curated audio archive that preserves this irreplaceable material and makes it accessible to new generations of listeners. Dreyfus’s ideas and teachings are more timely than ever in our current age of AI.

The Hubert L Dreyfus Foundation, Inc. is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization committed to advancing the humanistic and existential values of philosophy in a rapidly changing technological world, and to preserving the legacy of Professor Dreyfus’s distinctive approach to philosophical inquiry.

During nearly fifty years of teaching at Berkeley, from 1968 until his death in 2017, Dreyfus became a celebrated and often controversial voice in philosophy, especially for his prescient and ultimately vindicated critique of early AI. He was also a legendary teacher, always thinking aloud at the edge of his own understanding, drawing students into an adventure of shared inquiry. The surviving recordings bring listeners directly into that atmosphere: philosophy as a vital, searching, shared practice.

Dreyfus left behind an extraordinary archive: more than 1,000 cassettes of lectures on various dimensions of being human in a technological age, focused on Kierkegaard, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, existential philosophy, the philosophy of technology, and beyond; seminars with figures such as Michel Foucault, Jürgen Habermas, Richard Rorty, and Charles Taylor; and rare radio appearances and debates with major figures in the history of AI and Cognitive Science (e.g., Marvin Minsky and Daniel Dennett). This includes a reel of his 1964 presentation of “Alchemy and Artificial Intelligence” (the basis of his book, What Computers Can't Do) to the RAND Corporation, with obscenities uncensored!

In the early 2000s, Dreyfus's lectures reached wide audiences through iTunes, as noted in the Los Angeles Times. When those lectures disappeared from iTunes, they survived only in dispersed, degraded, and often mislabeled copies spread across the internet.

We are raising funds to create a professionally curated, web-based audio archive of Professor Dreyfus’s lectures, restoring audio quality, organizing materials, and integrating syllabi and course documents that have never been publicly available. With your support, we can begin this work immediately and launch the archive by the end of 2026. As we approach the ninth anniversary of Hubert’s death, the moment is right to ensure that this long-envisioned project becomes a reality. We seek to raise an initial $50,000 to establish the audio archive, secure the substantial print archive, and begin to lay the foundation for a durable institution dedicated to philosophical work in the spirit of Dreyfus.

Funds raised through this campaign will support the careful digitization and restoration of Professor Dreyfus’s lecture recordings, the design and creation of a publicly accessible online audio archive, and the basic infrastructure needed to steward this material responsibly into the future. Contributions will help cover professional audio restoration and preservation, website design and hosting, production of a detailed scholarly apparatus for the website (including historical details and philosophical context), archival storage for the original tapes and print materials, administrative costs for the nonprofit, including the tools required to support ongoing fundraising and public access to the archive. We are deeply grateful for your support and genuinely excited to make these lectures available to students, scholars, and the wider public for years to come.

At a time when AI systems increasingly shape how we relate to the world and to one another, Dreyfus’s work helps illuminate what remains essential in human life: embodied understanding, shared practices, and our capacity for care. Preserving his voice is a way of giving future generations the conceptual tools they will need to navigate the technological age we are entering.

Please help us make this audio archive a reality in 2026. All donations are tax-deductible.

If we raise $50,000 we create the audio archive in 2026. Ultimately, we seek to raise $500,000 to put the non-profit on a viable foundation for the next several years of activity.

The Hubert L Dreyfus Foundation’s Three-Year Vision

Our overarching aspiration is to set up The Hubert L Dreyfus Foundation as an active institution supporting and extending philosophical reflection and conversation in the spirit of Dreyfus's work.

In year one, our primary goal is the creation and launch of the professionally curated, web-based audio archive. This work includes digitization, audio restoration, careful cataloging, and the integration of syllabi and course materials. During year one we will also relocate Dreyfus’s voluminous print archive in a secure location and begin digitizing key elements. We will embed the recordings with a light layer of scholarly apparatus: dates, course information, guest speakers, key themes, and brief guides to the debates Dreyfus was intervening in, and their current relevance. At the end of year one (i.e. in early 2027), we aspire to convene a conference bringing together scholars working in fields shaped by Dreyfus’s thought, marking the public debut of the archive and the renewed work of the Foundation.

In year two, we will expand the Foundation’s public presence. We will launch a podcast drawing on the lecture archive and featuring new conversations with philosophers carrying forward Dreyfus’s intellectual tradition. We will establish a regular lecture series, and inaugurate an annual prize for the best paper in areas of philosophy central to Dreyfus’s work.

In year three, and beyond, we will continue the lecture series, paper prizes, and podcast, and begin editing selected lecture courses for publication, in addition to continuing to host events that highlight the continued relevance of Dreyfus's thought to our contemporary AI age. Together, these efforts will ensure that Dreyfus’s work remains not only preserved, but actively engaged with by future generations.

Hubert Dreyfus Audio Archive and Foundation Support

Preserving a Philosophical Legacy and Building Its Future

Team Members