#000626
The Rediscovery of the Mind
John Searle
A philosopher's spirited attempt to put consciousness back at the center of the study of the mind. John Searle argues that both hardcore materialism and old-fashioned dualism have gone wrong by trying to explain the mind away, and that we should instead take subjective, first-person experience seriously as a real, biological feature of the brain, a position he calls "biological naturalism." Along the way he mounts a pointed attack on strong artificial intelligence and the idea that the mind is a computer program. Published by MIT Press in 1992 in clear, combative prose, *The Rediscovery of the Mind* is one of the defining texts of late-twentieth-century philosophy of mind, written for anyone willing to think hard about what consciousness actually is.
more…less ▴
The author
John Searle (1932–2025) was among the most prominent American philosophers of language and mind, long based at UC Berkeley and famous for the "Chinese Room" argument against strong AI. His reputation, however, is now inseparable from a serious scandal: in 2019 a UC Berkeley investigation found that he had violated the university's sexual-harassment and retaliation policies against a former student and employee, and the university revoked his emeritus status. He had been sued for harassment in 2017, and the university had received earlier complaints. Those findings are well documented and belong in any honest account of the man.
The book
The Rediscovery of the Mind diagnoses what Searle sees as a shared mistake in twentieth-century thought: the assumption that consciousness must be either reduced to physics or exiled from science. His alternative, "biological naturalism," holds that mental states are caused by and realized in the brain yet are irreducibly subjective. He also renews his critique of computational theories of mind.
How it has aged
The book remains a landmark and a standard teaching text, admired even by opponents for its clarity. Critics, notably Daniel Dennett, argue Searle overstates the mystery of consciousness and leans too hard on intuition. The debates it framed, over qualia, intentionality, and machine minds, are only more urgent in the age of large AI systems.
For more context
Pair with Daniel Dennett's Consciousness Explained for the opposing view and David Chalmers's work on the "hard problem."
Sources
- Type
- Book
- Author / Maker
- John Searle
- Publisher
- MIT Press
- Place of publication
- Cambridge, MA
- Year
- 1992
- ISBN
- None
- Shelf
- Spirituality & Philosophy
- Location
- Colorado