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 Hubert L. 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 one hundred cassettes of lectures on Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, existential philosophy, and beyond; seminars with figures such as Michel Foucault, Jürgen Habermas, and Charles Taylor; and rare recordings dating back to his 1964 presentation of “Alchemy and Artificial Intelligence” to the RAND Corporation, with obscenities uncensored! In the early 2000s, his 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.

If we raise $50,000 we can get to work on the audio archive. Ultimately, we seek to raise $500,000 to put the non-profit on a viable foundation for the next three years of activity.

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.

Hubert Dreyfus Audio Archive and Foundation Support

By The Hubert L Dreyfus Foundation, Inc

Hubert Dreyfus Audio Archive and Foundation Support

Preserving a Philosophical Legacy and Building Its Future

Team Members