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.
rest in peace Searle
ReplyDeleteI had the ability to see a speech from him at Texas Christian University in about 1995. I don't remember what the speech was about, but I remember being very happy to attend.
ReplyDeleteGiven that Hudin herself was strongly implicated in the allegations against Searle, her protestations of his innocence really shouldn't carry much weight. She gives no proof whatsoever for her version of events, so I don't see why "the other side of the story" should be given any credence. If there was a conspiracy, let's hear some specifics. Otherwise, let's move on. John Searle was a great philosopher and a pervert. That the two should go together is hardly newsworthy.
ReplyDeleteShaggy,
DeleteWhy should merely being accused of wrongdoing (and apparently being cleared of the accusation) mean Hudin is lying about how the investigation went? I don't think it's reasonable to reach a conclusion with only this as a premise.
I haven't read that much about the allegations against Searle specifically, and it's not my place to say whether he's actually guilty or not. But to add to this, Colin McGinn, as he admits on his website where he posted the letter, has a case against himself as well. And at least from what I've looked up, documents with the inappropriate messages have been publicly released, and McGinn actually isn't denying that he sent them. He just says the relationship was consensual, but I don't think it's appropriate for a teacher to try to get into a relationship with a student in any case. So it's hard for me to believe his view that Searle is innocent. It is unfortunate that something like this happened to talk about in the first place - as The Great Thurible of Darkness states, Searle was a great philosopher. I haven't been a fan of the Chinese Room Argument, as I've mostly read the counterarguments for a long time (though lately I've been reconsidering it). But his argument that "computation" is observer-relative, as well as the discussion about intentionality, are things I've only found out about relatively recently, and I've been thinking about them a lot. Ever since I found out what "intentionality" really is, I've wanted to discuss it...
DeleteThankfully given the statement she made about the two judges who gave the verdict it should be fairly easy to verify or falsify by locating and consulting them.
DeleteAt this point in time, at the announcement of this death, I think it is bad form to speak badly of the man. Even if all the accusations in the lawsuit were true, which is in dispute, people should wait at least a month to urinate on his grave don't you think?
DeleteOTOH-False accusers have been known to cast their net widely so as to preempt other witnesses (look at, for example, Twana Brawley- when a DA corroborated a cop's story, Brawley and her team then claimed he was one of the rapists). Accusing his secretary would be a good tactic to preempt her supporting Searle,
DeleteSearle's work, The Construction of Social Reality, is another superb piece of philosophizing. The chapter defending the correspondence theory of truth is particularly good. He was a major philosopher.
ReplyDeleteLooking on the man only as a thinker*, truly a great philosopher, very interesting work he created, suprised he did not look up Aristotle.
ReplyDeleteThere is a series of Searle lectures about philosophy of the mind online. Interesting stuff.
*i did not remember even hearing about the polemics before, i admit
More than any other analytical philosopher Searle helped save epistemology from the Ur-Bad Idea of Imagism* by reawakening interest in intentionality.
ReplyDelete*Least it be forgotten that at around the same time Quine was using Wittgenstein’s arguments against Imagism as arguments against thought itself.
I liked that rifle, across his lap. Always appreciated a person with appreciation of fine firearms.
ReplyDeleteSeveral women had complained about sexual harassment from Prof Searle over a period of years. He was sued by a Ms. Ong He and the university that employed him settled the case. You can read more about his actions as well as the actual complaint here:
ReplyDeletehttps://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/katiejmbaker/john-searle-complaints-uc-berkeley
Interesting segment from the 2000 Reason article from Searle:
ReplyDeleteIt seems to me the leading sociopolitical event of the 20th century was the failure of socialism. Now that's an amazing phenomenon if you think about it, because in the middle years of this century, clever people thought there was no way capitalism could survive. When I was an undergraduate at Oxford in the 1950s, the conventional wisdom was that capitalism, because it is so inefficient and so stupid, because there's not a controlling intelligence behind it, cannot in the long run compete with an intelligently planned economy.
It's hard today to recover how widely that view was held among serious intellectuals. Very intelligent people thought that in the long run capitalism was doomed, and some kind of socialism was our future. Some people thought it was Marxist socialism, and other people thought we were going to have democratic socialism, but somehow or another it had to be socialism.
Where is it today? It's dead. Even the European socialist parties, though they still keep the names, are adopting various versions of capitalist welfare states. I would like an intelligent analysis of this, and I can't find it.
I can understand why boomers who never kept up with the times could still think socialism was still a thing, but why don't young people know this? Please don't drag its corpse around now and tell us it's the future.
I don’t know if he said any more to specify “socialism” in the article, but from the above claim about “capitalism” it sounds like there’s a bait and switch going on between “socialism” and forms of planned economy VS “capitalism” (presumably Smithian freemarket economics). Many philosophers throughout history have advocated for planned economies, but that term is so broad it could equally apply to Trumpian protectionism as any kind of modern socialism.
DeleteAnonymous@October 1, 2025 at 1:44 PM
DeleteFunny that you should think there is a bait and switch regarding the definition of socialism. From what I've seen people who claim they are socialists have always argued among themselves what "true" socialism is. If Stalin and Mao are mentioned, well, that's not "true" socialism. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_Scotsman
This is true but their fault for being intentionally misleading with language. But even the “true socialism” of Marx*, because that is what they are talking about in the above, literally requires a change in human nature itself to make it work (legacy of Feuerbach) which in turn relies on an empirically wrong predictions and internally incoherent metaphysics. My point in the above was that Searle is not justified in deriving “socialism,” from perceived failings of “capitalism” (put in scare quotes for exactly the same reason as you mentioned with socialism—that people play a bait and switch with it)—all he can get is that if “capitalism” is flawed in the way he describes then some form of economic interventionism will be necessitated. But if so that includes plenty of interventions socialists do not like.
DeleteAnonymous@October 2, 2025 at 10:51 AM
DeleteI agree that people play word games both with "socialism" and "capitalism". But that is for political reasons, not a desire for scientific precision which I believe was the purpose of the terms which arose from competing Enlightenment theories, don't you think?
I think Searle was merely making an observation of what the European leading intellectuals were in agreement with while he was over there and how they were spectacularly wrong. Today is 25 years after that interview and the question still stands:
I would like an intelligent analysis of this, and I can't find it.
Why?