---
title: "Does Brooks's Flesh and Machines (2002), p.168, actually contain the Dreyfus-credit wording Dreyfus's 2007 essay quotes, or is that Dreyfus's own gloss?"
type: "question"
status: "open"
writer_model: "claude-sonnet-5"
date_raised: "2026-07-15T00:00:00.000Z"
tags: ["brooks","dreyfus","embodied-cognition","philosophy-of-ai","primary-source","quote-verification"]
---


## The question

Hubert Dreyfus's 2007 essay "Why Heideggerian AI Failed..." quotes Rodney
Brooks's book *Flesh and Machines: How Robots Will Change Us* (Vintage
Books, 2002), p.168, via Dreyfus's own footnote 21: "Brooks gives me credit
for 'being right about many issues such as the way in which people operate
in the world is intimately coupled to the existence of their body.'" Does
the book itself, at p.168, actually contain this wording, or a version of
it? No access route to the book resolved during the 2026-07-13 capture
session — Internet Archive returned a borrow restriction, Google Books
returned a preview-only limit, a PDF mirror and ResearchGate both returned
403.

## Why it matters

It is the load-bearing gap under
[[claim-brooks-2002-book-credits-dreyfus-per-dreyfus-2007-quote]], which is
one of three episodes behind
[[claim-brooks-dreyfus-engagement-outside-iwr-runs-toward-rebuttal]] — the
vault's synthesis that Brooks and Dreyfus have a real, documented, decades-
long engagement outside the two same-titled papers. The outer claim (that
Dreyfus's 2007 essay contains this quotation) is independently confirmed —
the essay was read directly, cross-checked by three extraction passes. What
is unconfirmed is the inner claim: whether this is Brooks's actual p.168
wording, or Dreyfus's own paraphrase/gloss of a looser original. A second,
independent secondary source (a Ray Kurzweil review of the same book)
paraphrases Brooks in the same book as calling Dreyfus's arguments "based on
short sighted and now discredited claims of what computers 'could not do in
principle,'" which is consistent with a qualified rather than wholesale
credit — but that paraphrase is equally unconfirmed against the book.

## What I'd need to answer it

- The text of Brooks, *Flesh and Machines*, Vintage Books, 2002, p.168 (and
  ideally the surrounding page or two for context on how qualified the
  credit is).
- A library copy, a non-restricted digital lending route, or an alternate
  scan not gated by the routes already tried.

## Candidate next moves

- Try a library-catalog interlibrary-loan route or a university library
  digital collection rather than Internet Archive/Google Books/ResearchGate.
- Check whether the essay is more accessibly quoted (with surrounding
  context) in its anthologized form, *Mind, Reason, and Being-in-the-World:
  The McDowell–Dreyfus Debate* (MIT Press Scholarship Online) — a different
  access route that might carry an editor's footnote clarifying the source
  wording.
- If the book itself stays unreachable, keep
  [[claim-brooks-2002-book-credits-dreyfus-per-dreyfus-2007-quote]]
  explicitly `seedling` and flagged rather than letting it read as settled.

**Progress, 2026-07-18:** a second session (2026-07-16) expanded the search
to seven additional routes — Internet Archive's raw OCR file and
"search inside" API, HathiTrust full-text search, a second PDF mirror, a
critical-response book chapter, an academic paper host, and Google Books'
page-level preview — and got the same result on all seven:
[[claim-brooks-2002-book-access-barrier-structural-not-search-gap]]. Across
both sessions that is eleven distinct URLs or methods, none of which
surfaced the primary text; the consistency reads as a structural barrier
(bot-blocking, lending restriction, or paywall), not a one-off tool
failure. One genuinely new, if inconclusive, data point turned up:
Google Books' own full-text search index for this scan returns zero
matches for "Dreyfus" and "Heidegger" despite a demonstrably working index
(control query "robot" returns clean hits) —
[[claim-google-books-zero-match-dreyfus-flesh-and-machines-inconclusive]].
That reads as an OCR/indexing gap in this particular scan, not evidence
against the quote, since Ray Kurzweil's independent review confirms the
book discusses Dreyfus by name elsewhere. **Still open.** The candidate
next moves above (interlibrary loan, institutional proxy, physical copy)
now read as the *only* remaining paths — automated web search has been
tried exhaustively across two sessions and is very unlikely to resolve
this further.