The author of discipline-defining studies of human cognition and artificial intelligence, John Haugeland was a charismatic, highly original voice in the contemporary forum of Anglo-American analytic philosophy. At his death in 2010, he left behind an unfinished manuscript, more than a decade in the making, intended as a summation of his life-long engagement with one of the twentieth century's most influential philosophical tracts, Heidegger's Being and Time (1927). Dasein Disclosed brings together in a single volume the writings of a man widely acknowledged as one of Heidegger's preeminent and most provocative interpreters. A labyrinth of notoriously difficult ideas and terminology, Being and Time has inspired copious commentary. Not content merely to explain, Haugeland aspired to a sweeping reevaluation of Heidegger's magnum opus and its conception of human life as Dasein-a reevaluation focused on Heidegger's effort to reawaken philosophically dormant questions of what it means "to be." Interpreting Dasein unconventionally as "the living of a living way of life," Haugeland put involvement in a shared world, rather than individual persons or their experience, at the heart of Heidegger's phenomenology of understanding and truth. Individuality, Haugeland insists, emerges in the call to take responsibility for a collective way of being in the world. He traces this thought to Heidegger's radical conclusion that one does not truly understand philosophical concepts unless that understanding changes how one lives. As illuminating as it is iconoclastic, Dasein Disclosed is not just Haugeland's Heidegger-it is a major contribution to philosophy in its own right.

"Machines who think -- how utterly preposterous," huff beleaguered humanists, defending their dwindling turf. "Artificial Intelligence -- it's here and about to surpass our own," crow techno-visionaries, proclaiming dominion. It's so simple and obvious, each side maintains, only a fanatic could disagree.

Deciding where the truth lies between these two extremes is the main purpose of John Haugeland's marvelously lucid and witty book on what artificial intelligence is all about. Although presented entirely in non-technical terms, it neither oversimplifies the science nor evades the fundamental philosophical issues. Far from ducking the really hard questions, it takes them on, one by one.

Artificial intelligence, Haugeland notes, is based on a very good idea, which might well be right, and just as well might not. That idea, the idea that human thinking and machine computing are "radically the same," provides the central theme for his illuminating and provocative book about this exciting new field. After a brief but revealing digression in intellectual history, Haugeland systematically tackles such basic questions as: What is a computer really? How can a physical object "mean" anything? What are the options for computational organization? and What structures have been proposed and tried as actual scientific models for intelligence?

In a concluding chapter he takes up several outstanding problems and puzzles -- including intelligence in action, imagery, feelings and personality -- and their enigmatic prospects for solution.

The unifying theme of these thirteen essays is understanding. What is it? What does it take to have it? What does it presuppose in what can be understood? In the first group of essays John Haugeland addresses mind and intelligence. Intelligibility comes to the fore in a set of "metaphysical" pieces on analog and digital systems and supervenience. In the third set of papers Haugeland elaborates and then undermines a battery of common presuppositions about the foundational notions of intentionality and representation. Finally, the fourth and most recent group of essays confronts the essential character of understanding in relation to what is understood. The necessary interdependence between personality and intelligence is developed and explained, specifically in the conditions of the possibility of objective scientific knowledge.