Dreyfus on Merleau-Ponty

In this 1995 interview with Harry Kreisler, acclaimed U.C. Berkeley philosophy professor Dreyfus discusses the importance of French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty's (1908-1961) views in relation to computers, artificial intelligence, and the Internet.

Merleau-Ponty's primary focus on the "body" and "intercorporeality" is the key "coping" mechanism that allows us to "get a grip on reality," in a way that Dreyfus labels "normativity".

Part Two:

Dreyfus feels that Heidegger was more concerned with an existential critique of Cartesian "mental representations" in Being and Time, Merleau-Ponty's focus was always the "body with its skills that allows us to relate to things and others"... bodiless cyberspace cannot, for Dreyfus, eliminate this basic phenomenological premise.