Consciousness and Language

A collection of essays from one of the most influential philosophers of the last 30 years.

John R. Searle (Author)

9780521597449, Cambridge University Press

Paperback, published 15 July 2002

280 pages, 2 b/w illus.
23 x 15.4 x 1.9 cm, 0.39 kg

"The scope and consistency of these views, which have now became classical, is truly impressing...Searle is doing some genuinely pioneering work here, suggesting some genuinely new research programs in philosophy of mind."- Alexandre Billon, Metapsychology Online Reviews

One of the most important and influential philosophers of the last 30 years, John Searle has been concerned throughout his career with a single overarching question: how can we have a unified and theoretically satisfactory account of ourselves and of our relations to other people and to the natural world? In other words, how can we reconcile our common-sense conception of ourselves as conscious, free, mindful, rational agents in a world that we believe comprises brute, unconscious, mindless, meaningless, mute physical particles in fields of force? The essays in this collection are all related to the broad overarching issue that unites the diverse strands of Searle's work. Gathering in an accessible manner essays available only in relatively obscure books and journals, this collection will be of particular value to professionals and upper-level students in philosophy as well as to Searle's more extended audience in such fields as psychology and linguistics.

1. The problem of consciousness
2. How to study consciousness scientifically
3. Consciousness
4. Animal minds
5. Intentionality and its place in nature
6. Collective intentions and actions
7. The explanation of cognition
8. Intentionalistic explanations in the social sciences
9. Individual intentionality and social phenomena in the theory of speech acts
10. How performatives work
11. Conversation
12. Analytic philosophy and mental phenomena
13. Indeterminacy, empiricism and the first person
14. Skepticism about rules and intentionality.

Subject Areas: Western philosophy, from c 1900 - [HPCF], Philosophy of language [CFA], Biography: general [BG]