Our self-conception derives mostly from our own experience. We believe ourselves to be conscious, rational, social, ethical, language-using, pol... read full description
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Jun 12, 2011
Jafar
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I read another book by John Searle in which he was mainly trying to prove that both dualism and materialism are wrong when it comes to explaining consciousness. He repeats the same line here a few times. Now I can’t remember at all how he tried to prove that point in his earlier book. So much for all these books that I read. How can both dualism and materialism be wrong? But anyway... this is a nice little book on the age-old question of freedom of will. Searle doesn’t attempt to solve the probl
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Oct 10, 2011
Deniz Cem
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Classic Searle, reasoning through nothing but plain common sense, and dismissing fruitful (and possibly accurate) ideas/theories on the basis that they are "intellectually very unsatisfying" (p. 62), or "literally incredible" (p. 77).
The most obvious and even fun case is on pages 45–46 where he literally uses his nemesis Dennett's heterophenomenology approach ("Granted that we have the experience of freedom, is that experience valid or is it illusory?"), More...
The most obvious and even fun case is on pages 45–46 where he literally uses his nemesis Dennett's heterophenomenology approach ("Granted that we have the experience of freedom, is that experience valid or is it illusory?"), More...
Jul 03, 2009
Tyler
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Searle's ideas reminded me a little bit of Jiddu Krishnamurti. They are both pretty tough-minded when it comes to dealing with the facts of neuroscience.
Mar 26, 2008
The last century has seen a radical shift in philosophy, basically stemming from the realization that philosophy has been radically outpaced by science and everything else. So a century of work has gone into trying to correct the unchecked assumptions that have been growing since Plato. This is the most insecure century of thought. Don't bother with it, just jump ahead to Searle, Neurobiology and Linguistics.
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Jul 03, 2008
I never took John Searle seriously because I only knew him from Limited Inc., where Derrida rips him a new one about the whole speech acts thing. This book sounds awesome.
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