The Hubert L. Dreyfus Foundation, a nonprofit, public benefit corporation founded by Hubert Dreyfus’s family following the philosopher’s death in 2017, is raising funds to establish an audio archive.
B. Scot Rouse, a visiting scholar at UC Berkeley who is assisting the Foundation with the project, writes that there are “more than one hundred cassettes of lectures” from which the archive would be assembled.
The archive is the first step in a three-year plan “to transform Hubert L. Dreyfus’s archival legacy into a living intellectual resource.”
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.
The Foundation aims to raise $50,000. You can contribute to the project here.
The linked website does not adequately explain how they intend to use the money. It does not take $50,000 to archive 100 cassettes. A concerned family member could make digital copies and load them to an inexpensive internet site.
Hi Chris, I think you’re significantly underestimating how technically demanding really good audio transfer and digital archiving work is. My brother (a musician, radio producer, and archivist) has done a lot of work making preservation grade transfers of old tapes. The physical media themselves are often degraded and require significant care even to get them in shape for transfer. Editing and cleanup are an entire other process, and the tools are not trivial to learn. Creating an actual archive (rather than just a web dump) is also a specialized discipline, not to mention making a usable front-end that may involve search capacities, indexing, etc. I can’t speak to the accuracy of their cost estimate but digital preservation is a real job for which professionals are legitimately compensated. It’s not any kind of project that can be done in a family member’s spare time.
This is B. Scot Rousse. Thank you Dan for chiming in (and also connecting me with your brother who sent me a very helpful email with an offer to help on the project).
I also acknowledge the point made by Christopher Gauker above. In the fundraiser page, I added more details about the costs that the fundraiser will help us cover, and some more context about our larger aspirations for The Hubert L Dreyfus Foundation over the next few years.
Thanks again to Daily Nous for sharing the info about this project.
OK, thank you. Good luck!
Hi Dan, point taken. Thank you.