Damian, this post is uncannily accurate at turning over interesting rocks, both regarding Lionhead, Richard Evans, my own life, and project Dimitri :)

Minsky's "the problem with philosophers is that they never build anything" is one way of describing why I got out of academic philosophy in the first place, and into new AI approaches at Sussex University. It's also one way of describing why I got out of academic new AI and into the games industry! It's also one of the main things discussed at my interviews for the position at Lionhead, with Richard Evans. I think we discussed Heidegger for half an hour at that interview!

Despite putting more and more distance between myself and academic philosophy, this whole personal journey remained motivated by the early work of Heidegger. It's also fair to say that phenomenological theory of one sort or another continues to heavily influence both my personal life and my work every day.

Heh, count me in for a 'me too'. :) I cut my teeth on Heideggerian robotics - emphasizing behavior as primary to abstract reasoning, specialization in many specific tasks over single general problem-solving machinery, primacy of perception over abstract representation, etc. Hell, even my work on communication and social interaction is based *completely* on these principles. :)

And I've come to love that artificial intelligence is very much an 'applied philosophy'. Nowhere else are ontological and epistemological assumptions about the world so quickly delivered to their logical conclusions, their boundaries explored, and their validity questioned.

It's good to see so many continentalists in the community. Gives me hope that maybe it's not an insane perspective after all. ;)