John Searle's philosophy of the mind

Abstract

This article exposes and critically evaluates John Searle's philosophy of the mind. The starting point is a historical revision and a critical balance of the different solutions, dualists and materialists, the philosophy of the mind has offered to the problems of nature, mental phenomena, and the mind/body relation. According to Searle, both dualism and materialism, the dominant perspectives of the study of the mind, are wrong on these issues. Searle proposes an alternative perspective to biological naturalism, which hopes to resolve the mind/body problem and explain the nature of mental phenomena. This article exposes and critically evaluates this perspective.