Designed for a first course in the philosophy of mind, this book has several distinctive features.

This volume collects contributions that comprise each view point, and incorporates articles by William Bechtel, Jerry Fodor, Jaegwon Kim, Joėlle Proust, and ...

Helen Steward puts forward a radical critique of the foundations of contemporary philosophy of mind, arguing that it relies too heavily on insecure assumptions about the sorts of things there are in the mind--events, processes, and states. She offers a fresh investigation of these three categories, clarifying the distinctions between them, and argues that the category of state has been very widely and seriously misunderstood.

This is a volume of original essays on key aspects of John Searle's philosophy of language. It examines Searle's work in relation to current issues of central significance, including internalism versus externalism about mental and linguistic content, truth-conditional versus non-truth-conditional conceptions of content, the relative priorities of thought and language in the explanation of intentionality, the status of the distinction between force and sense in the theory of meaning, the issue of meaning scepticism in relation to rule-following, and the proper (...) characterization of ‘what is said’ in relation to the semantics/pragmatics distinction. Written by a distinguished team of contemporary philosophers, and prefaced by an illuminating essay by Searle, the volume aims to contribute to a deeper understanding of Searle's work in philosophy of language, and to suggest innovative approaches to fundamental questions in that area. (shrink)

This is a review article about John Searle's most recent book The Rediscovery of the Mind, which criticizes it for not going far enough in its departure from orthodox materialistic views of the brain and mind. It argues that Searle's two central propositions, consciousness is irreducible and consciousness cannot cause anything that cannot be explained by the causal behaviour of neurons, are incompatible; and suggests that it is reasonable and scientifically respectable to reject the latter rather than the former.