Consciousness and Language
Lucidly exploring the philosophically hot topics of  consciousness, intentionality and language, this set of essays  provides a useful overview of Searle's (Rationality in Action)  recent work. All but one of the essays, written over the last  two decades, have been previously published, yet they gain by  being assembled not only in convenience but in seeing how the  problems and proposed solutions connect. The overarching issue,  which Searle, a philosophy professor at the University of  California, Berkeley, says has "preoccupied" him throughout his  professional life, is how to reconcile our commonsense view of  ourselves as conscious, mindful beings with a world that  supposedly "consists entirely of brute, unconscious, mindless...  physical particles in fields of force." In the first group of  essays, Searle rejects both dualist and materialist accounts of  consciousness as traditionally construed, arguing instead that  "the conscious mind is caused by brain processes and is itself a  higher level feature of the brain" with an irreducible  "first-person ontology" and the power to cause behavior. He goes  on to apply this philosophy of mind to a number of related  issues, including animal minds (notably that of his dog, Ludwig  Wittgenstein Searle), intentionality (that feature which links  mental states to something in the world), collective  "we-intentions," social science explanations and speech acts.  Throughout, he spars with rivals, particularly in the final  essays, where he attacks Dennett's functionalism, Quine's  indeterminacy thesis and Kripke's reading of Wittgenstein. This  is not an introductory-level book: many of the issues are  abstruse and technical. But Searle's prose is admirably clear  and plain, and he is deft at cutting through jargon to defend a  commonsense view of the reality of minds. (May 13)  Forecast: Searle is a major philosopher, and university  libraries are a lock. Searle's frequent contributions to the New  York Review of Books may draw in some readers, but because most  of this work has been previously published, expect few trade  reviews.Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.