John Searle (Philosophy Now) - Hardcover

Fotion, Nick

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0691057117 ISBN 13: 9780691057118

Publisher: Princeton University Press, 2001

Synopsis

One of the world's most important philosophers of mind and language, John Searle (b. 1932) is direct, combative, and intellectually ambitious. His philosophy has made fundamental and lasting contributions to how we think about speech, consciousness, knowledge, truth, and the nature of social reality. Here, with remarkable clarity, a leading authority introduces students and generalists to those contributions.

Nick Fotion explains Searle's ideas in full, while also testing and exploring their implications. He first takes up Searle's philosophy of language, examining how Searle treats speech acts and thinks about the metaphorical use of language. Next, the book sketches Searle's philosophy of mind, including his claims for intentionality and for the centrality of consciousness. This discussion highlights Searle's argument that the mind possesses a subjective character that materialist explanations (including behaviorism and strong artificial intelligence) cannot contain. The author goes on to look at Searle's later writings on the construction of social reality--work that mounts a sophisticated but plainly stated case against deconstructionist, skeptical, and relativistic accounts.

Concluding with general reflections on Searle's position vis-à-vis ontology and epistemology, this book is the first to assess and identify common themes and approaches in the whole range of his extensive thought. In doing so, it presents Searle's extremely influential work for the first time as a coherent philosophy.

About this title

Review

Only a handful of recent American philosophers are widely read outside university philosophy departments, and John Searle is surely among them. Not only does his work ascend to the rarified heights of analytic philosophy, but he has carved out a niche for himself as a popular defender of commonsense realism and a gadfly to postmodern philosophy. John Searle is part of the Philosophy Now series, published by Princeton University Press, which offers engaging looks at some of today's most prominent philosophers. With consistently clear prose, Nick Fotion guides the reader through the nettlesome thickets of recent philosophy of language, explaining how Searle's philosophy of mind is in many ways a corollary of his views on language.

Fotion, a professor of philosophy at Emory University, does an admirable job of limning Searle's philosophical work. Searle first appeared on the philosophical scene in 1969 with the publication of his seminal Speech Acts, which detailed a new theory of how language has meaning. A student of the well-known British philosopher J.L. Austin, Searle elaborated on the importance of intentionality in language use. Of particular interest to a general readership is his latter-day combat with a cohort of intellectual opponents he calls "antirealists." The salvos appeared in his 1995 book The Construction of Social Reality, in which he defends the existence of objects outside our minds. Sound obvious? It's not, according to his adversaries. On this score, and on others, Fotion does a wonderful job of marrying Searle's polemics to his philosophical rigor. --Eric de Place

From the Back Cover

"This book presents a generally accurate and well-organized overview of Searle's philosophical work at a level that is suitable for upper-division undergraduates or beginning graduate students. The greatest virtue of the book is its clarity and responsible presentation of the material. There is no competing book on the market, and there will be demand due to the general interest in Searle's work not only among philosophers but also among literary theorists, art historians, and a broader range of humanist scholars."--Sean D. Kelly, Princeton University

About this edition

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 0691057117
• ISBN 13: 9780691057118
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 256