The quasi-existentialist conditions on intelligence point to the second major component of Smith’s approach to the relationship between philosophy and artificial intelligence. This is the choice to use Heideggarian existential phenomenology as the primary resource for understanding what it is to be intelligent. Here Smith participates in an older tradition associated with Hubert Dreyfus and the late John Haugeland (Haugeland is Smith’s major philosophical interlocutor, and the book is dedicated to him). Like Dreyfus and Haugeland, Smith is interested in disentangling Heidegger’s insights from Heidegger’s often daunting vocabulary, and in using those insights to interpret developments in computing. The interpretation of Heidegger on offer also supplements Heideggarian existential phenomenology with ethical content whose origin in the source texts is not obvious.

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