The American philosopher John Searle, who has died aged 93, first made his name in philosophy of language, then in philosophy of mind, and finally in “philosophy of society”, a new field of study that he helped to establish. He aimed to produce a unified theory of all three.
His overall question, posed in Making the Social World (2010), was: “How is it possible in a universe consisting entirely of physical particles in fields of force that there can be such things as consciousness, intentionality [the “aboutness” of thinking], free will, language, society, ethics, aesthetics and political reality.”
