Review:
John Searle's summation of earlier writings is not just an essential tie-up volume for existing readers; it is also a perfect introduction to the work of one of the clearest heads in the philosophy of mind. Searle's book is a riposte to all those academics who make a career out of contradicting and complicating such default positions as the existence of an external reality, the reality of personal consciousness, and the reasonable fit of language to the perceived world. Certainly, we should examine these positions! But the first duty of philosophy, Searle argues, is that it should attempt to accommodate what is known. As far as we can tell, for example, consciousness is a biological product, but there is a long-running contention between the materialists--whose reductive descriptions of consciousness arrive, finally, at an embarrassed denial that consciousness exists at all--and the dualists, who cannot describe consciousness without evoking some supernatural involvement. Neither position is tenable--each offers some corrective to the other. The good explanation is in there somewhere, but the sheer intractability of the debate won't let it be expressed. In situations like this, Searle argues, it is always the terms that are wrong. Terms, mind you, that in this case include "matter," "mind," "physical," and "mental"! Searle--married as he is to common sense--is of necessity one of our most iconoclastic and creative thinkers. --Simon Ings, Amazon.co.uk
About the Author:
John R. Searle was born in Denver, Colorado, in 1932. He attended the University of Wisconsin from 1949 to 1952 and studied at Oxford University, where he received his BA, MA, and Ph.D. Phil and was a Rhodes Scholar. He taught as a lecturer in philosophy at Christ Church in Oxford from 1956 to 1959 and since then has been a professor of philosophy at the University of California at Berkeley. He has also been a visiting professor at many universities, both in the US and abroad, including the universities of Syracuse, Rutgers, Colorado, SUNY Buffalo, Washington, Michigan, Venice, Florence, Frankfurt, Toronto, Campinas (Brazil), Oslo, Berlin, and Oxford.
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