At Daily Nous, Dustin Sigsbee reports,
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.
“John Searle (1932-2025), September 28, 2025”
He wrote a number of books, including Minds, Brains, and Science, Intentionality: An Essay in the Philosophy of Mind, Speech Acts, and The Rediscovery of the Mind. But his Chinese Room thought experiment, an argument for why computers can seem clever without having minds, was what he was probably best known for:
Edward Feser’s Comments
Fellow philosopher Edward Feser offers a tribute:
Searle was one of the true greats of contemporary philosophy, having made huge and lasting contributions to several of its subdisciplines, but especially to philosophy of mind and philosophy of language. His work had an enormous influence on me in my undergrad and graduate student years.
“John Searle (1932-2025)”, September 28, 2025
That, in itself, is quite interesting because Feser is a philosopher in the Catholic tradition of Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274) and Searle was an atheist. Feser continues,
Searle was famously self-confident, but he had a sense of humor about it. In the Q and A session after a talk I gave at a conference we were both at, he strongly took issue with the Aristotelianism I was defending. After the session I told him I was surprised he was not more open to Aristotelian arguments, given the article his colleague Alan Code had contributed to a festschrift on Searle, arguing that there were important parallels between Searle’s views and Aristotle’s. With a twinkle in his eye, he replied: “Oh yeah, I remember that article. I thought he made Aristotle sound pretty good!”
“John Searle (1932-2025)”
Surprisingly Little Attention
Feser notes that, despite the significance of the Chinese Room argument in popular culture, Searle’s passing has received surprisingly little attention:
Philosophers like Kripke, Putnam, Dennett and Fodor got obituaries in major outlets like @nytimes and @guardian. Yet as far as I can see (anyone know otherwise?), there has, so far, still been no such obituary for John Searle, who was no less eminent. This is absurd and unjust.
The Chinese Room, of course, will live on. It helped us see the nature of computation, as opposed to thinking. In a sense, it did for our view of computers what Thomas Nagel’s essay “What is it like to be a bat?” did for our view of animal mind: provided a simple, clear way of understanding an issue.
In that essay, Nagel was suggesting that we ask, “Is there anything that it is like to be that animal?” If there is, then to that extent, the animal is in some sense conscious (sentient consciousness). There is obviously something that it is like to be a dog but maybe there is nothing that it is like to be a sea cucumber. Of course, we can’t know for sure but Nagel’s approach is a good beginning.
Cross-posted at Mind Matters News.