Searle to Deliver Lecture on Nov. 3

Date: 10/24/06
Contact: Kathy Beal

Illinois State University Department of Philosophy in conjunction with the Illinois Philosophical Association will host a lecture titled "What is Language?" by University of California-Berkeley Professor John Searle at 6:30 p.m. on Friday, Nov. 3, in the Bone Student Center Old Main Room. The presentation is free and open to the public.

Searle is one of the world's best-known philosophers. He earned his doctorate at Oxford University on a Rhodes Scholarship and has taught at UC-Berkeley since 1959. He has published 16 books, including the seminal Speech Acts, Intentionality, and The Construction of Social Reality. His latest, due out in January, is Freedom and Neurobiology. His works have been translated into 21 languages.

Searle has won the Jean Nicod Prize; the National Humanities Medal; Guggenheim, Fulbright, and Rockefeller fellowships; and has served as president of the American Philosophical Association. He has held more than two dozen visiting professorships and given hundreds of invited lectures worldwide.

Searle's work has been the subject of more than a dozen books and many conferences. He is most famous for his detailed defense of the speech act theory of language from which he has developed a distinctive conception of the mind, called biological naturalism, including a critique of artificial intelligence (his famous Chinese Room Argument), a detailed theory of intentionality, a neurobiological account of consciousness and an analysis of the constitution of social groups and political power.