John Searle (1932-2025)

Daily Nous has reported that John Searle has died.  Searle was one of the true greats of contemporary philosophy, having made huge and lasting contributions to several of its subdisciplines, but especially to philosophy of mind and philosophy of language.  His work had an enormous influence on me in my undergrad and graduate student years.  His books Minds, Brains, and Science, Intentionality: An Essay in the Philosophy of Mind, Speech Acts, and The Rediscovery of the Mind were especially formative.  And his uncommonly lucid style was the main model for my own approach to philosophical writing.  I had the pleasure of meeting and talking to him on several occasions, and Steven Postrel and I interviewed him for Reason magazine over twenty-five years ago.

Searle was famously self-confident, but he had a sense of humor about it.  In the Q and A session after a talk I gave at a conference we were both at, he strongly took issue with the Aristotelianism I was defending.  After the session I told him I was surprised he was not more open to Aristotelian arguments, given the article his colleague Alan Code had contributed to a festschrift on Searle, arguing that there were important parallels between Searle’s views and Aristotle’s.  With a twinkle in his eye, he replied: “Oh yeah, I remember that article.  I thought he made Aristotle sound pretty good!”

I’ve had a fair amount to say about Searle’s views in various places, most recently in my book Immortal Souls.  Some readers might find of interest a couple of papers wherein I engage with his views in depth: “Why Searle Is a Property Dualist” and “From Aristotle to John Searle and Back Again: Formal Causes, Teleology, and Computation in Nature.”

Searle suffered enormous harm to his personal reputation and career in the last years of his life.  Most who know of this have only heard one side of the story.  There is another side to it, which is given by his longtime secretary Jennifer Hudin in an email that has been published at Colin McGinn’s blog.

What I can say with certainty is that philosophy is in debt to his work, and that I am personally in great debt to it.  Though I was never formally his student, it feels as if one of my teachers has died.  Requiescat in pace.