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

We are raising funds to create a professionally curated, web-based audio archive of Professor Dreyfus’s celebrated lectures. With your support, we can begin this work immediately and launch the site 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 archive finally becomes a reality.

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

Dreyfus left behind an extraordinary archive. More than 100 cassettes of lectures on Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Existentialism, and beyond. Seminars with Michel Foucault, Jürgen Habermas, Charles Taylor, and others. Dozens of minidiscs and CDRs. Even a reel-to-reel tape from his 1964 presentation of “Alchemy and Artificial Intelligence” to the RAND Corporation.

Hubert was an early practitioner of podcasting. As noted in the Los Angeles Times article “The iPod Lecture Circuit” (2007), his courses reached vast new audiences in the early 2000s. But when the lectures disappeared from iTunes, they survived only in dispersed, low-quality fragments. If you have learned from the unofficial copies scattered across YouTube, the Internet Archive, or other file-sharing sites, you know their value. You also know their fragility. Most of the available recordings are degraded, mislabeled, and edited in ways that Dreyfus did not approve. None include the syllabi or illuminating handouts he generously provided and that we still have in his archive.

With your support, we can safeguard these resources and make them accessible, coherent, and enduring. Every contribution moves us closer to that goal. All donations are tax-deductible.

We seek to raise an initial $500,000 to establish the audio archive, and to begin building the foundation for a robust institution to support research in the spirit of Professor Dreyfus. Our ultimate vision for the Foundation includes: housing the print archive in a secure location, digitizing the print archive, establishing a yearly lecture series, creating a podcast to share Hubert’s lectures and to showcase ongoing research carrying on his tradition and interests, supporting graduate and undergraduate students, creating an annual prize for the best paper in the areas of philosophy important to Hubert, and more.

At a time when AI systems increasingly shape how we relate to the world and how we engage one another, Dreyfus’s work illuminates the stakes. His lectures help reveal what remains essential in human life: our embodied understanding, our shared practices, 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. Make your tax-deductible donation now.

The Hubert L Dreyfus Foundation, Inc

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