In §7.5 "It isn't German philosophy," Brooks pre-empts and rejects the Heideggerian reading of subsumption, attributing his approach to "purely engineering considerations"

Section 7.5 of "Intelligence without representation" (Artificial Intelligence 47 (1991), 139–159), titled "It isn't German philosophy," directly addresses the philosophical-lineage question. Brooks writes:

"In some circles much credence is given to Heidegger as one who understood the dynamics of existence. Our approach has certain similarities to work inspired by this German philosopher (e.g. [1]) but our work was not so inspired. It is based purely on engineering considerations. That does not preclude it from being used in philosophical debate as an example on any side of any fence, however."

The bracketed reference [1] is Agre and Chapman's unpublished 1986 MIT AI Lab memo — not Dreyfus. Brooks names Heidegger, the philosopher central to Dreyfus's critique of representationalist AI (claim-dreyfus-critique-targeted-symbolic-ai-not-neural-nets), only to hold him at arm's length: the resemblance is conceded as surface-level, and the origin of the subsumption architecture is attributed to engineering practice.

This is a stronger negative finding than the bare absence of a citation (claim-brooks-1991-does-not-cite-dreyfus). Brooks raises the phenomenological comparison himself, unprompted, in a dedicated section — and declines it in writing. He did not merely fail to cite the lineage; he pre-empted the comparison and rejected it. This is a primary-text leg of the synthesis at claim-brooks-dreyfus-lineage-is-convergence-not-citation and helps resolve question-brooks-1991-dreyfus-anti-representation-lineage. A live downstream lead — whether Agre & Chapman's cited memo is itself Dreyfus/Heidegger-influenced — remains open at question-brooks-dreyfus-secondary-literature-reception-lineage.