Philosopher John Searle, well-known for his work on philosophy of mind and philosophy of language, has died.

John Searle wrote extensively consciousness and the mind, intentionality, and speech act theory. He is especially well known for his Chinese Room Argument on artificial intelligence. He has also made contributions to philosophical work on social ontology, rationality, and perception. Some of his works include Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language (1969), Intentionality: An Essay in the Philosophy of Mind (1983), The Construction of Social Reality (1995), Rationality in Action (2001), Making the Social World: The Structure of Human Civilization (2010), and Seeing Things as They Are: A Theory of Perception (2015). You can read more about his work here.

Searle was on the faculty at the University of California, Berkeley from 1959 to 2019. He received his DPhil from the University of Oxford in 1959. He also received his MA and BA from Oxford.

In 2019, Searle was stripped of his emeritus status at Berkeley as a result of the university finding that he violated its sexual harassment policies. In 2017 he was sued for sexual harassment (unsuccessfully). The university had received several sexual harassment complaints about him over the years.

Over the course of his career, Searle was the recipient of several awards and honors, including the Jean Nicod Prize, the National Humanities Medal, and the Mind & Brain Prize. He has also been awarded several honorary doctorates.

(via Gosha (George) Cherkasov)

Obituaries elsewhere:

• The Times
• The Guardian
• IFL Science