Subscribe to Elucidations: We are pleased to present John Searle, Slusser Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley, who joins us for a stimulating and wide ranging conversation (click here).
First he gives his assessment of how the field of philosophy has changed since his time as a graduate student at Oxford in the 1950’s, charting the decline of ‘ordinary language’ philosophy and the reemergence of Metaphysics and substantive ethics. Professor Searle tells us why he lacks sympathy for contemporary philosophy’s emphasis on formal methods of analysis. These methods, he worries, lose sight of the problems that they were originally developed to solve. Consequently, it is not so much that their results are wrong as that they are unilluminating. In contrast, his interest is in giving an account of human reality (of ourselves as mindful, social, political, aesthetic, speech-act users) that is consistent with our understanding of the world as a chemical-physical system.
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