LINGUIST List 13.156

Tue Jan 22 2002

Books: Philosophy of Language

Editor for this issue: Naomi Ogasawara <naomilinguistlist.org>

Directory

1. Joyce Reid, Philosophy of Language: Consciousness and Language by John R. Searle

Consciousness and Language

John R. Searle, University of California, Berkeley, CA

One of the most important and influential philosophers of the last 30
years, John Searle has been concerned throughout his career with a
single overarching question: how can we have a unified and
theoretically satisfactory account of ourselves and of our relations
to other people and to the natural world? In other words, how can we
reconcile our common-sense conception of ourselves as conscious, free,
mindful, rational agents in a world that we believe includes brute,
unconscious, mindless, meaningless, mute physical particles in fields
of force? The essays in this collection are related to this broad
overarching issue that unites the diverse strands of Searle's work. As
many as these essays have previously only been available in relatively
obscure books and journals, this collection will be of particular
interest to philosophers and those in psychology and linguistics.


Contents:

1. The problem of consciousness; 
2. How to study consciousness scientifically;
3. Consciousness; 
4. Animal minds; 
5. Intentionality and its place in nature; 
6. Collective intentions and actions; 
7. The explanation of cognition; 
8. Intentionalistic explanations in the social sciences; 
9. Individual intentionality and social phenomena in the theory of 
 speech acts; 
10.How performatives work;
11.Conversation; 
12.Analytic philosophy and mental phenomena; 
13.Indeterminacy, empiricism and the first person; 
14.Skepticism about rules and intentionality.

2002/280 pp./2 line diagrams

0-521-59237-2/Hb/List: $64.95 Disc.: $51.96
0-521-59744-7/Pb/List: $23.00 Disc.: $18.40

Cambridge University Press
http://www.cup.org