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    The McMaster Department of Philosophy has now put together the following notice commemorating Barry: Barry Allen: A Philosophical Life Barry…

In Memoriam: John Searle (1932-2025)

Brian Leiter

Professor Searle, who taught for decades at the University of California at Berkeley, wrote widely and influentially in philosophy of language and philosophy of mind. (See, e.g., the entries at SEP on speech acts,”the Chinese room” argument and “social institutions” for a sense of his work and its influence..)

In 2017, he was the target of a sexual harassment lawsuit by a former student (earlier coverage here), although that lawsuit did not lead to a finding against him. He was, however, stripped of his “emeritus” title at Berkeley for unspecified violations of the university’s sexual harassment policy. (There is no serious doubt that he had numerous sexual liasons with his students over many years.)

Comments are open for remembrances from those who knew Professor Searle or for those who wish to comment on the significance of his work. (Comments unrelated to personal recollections or his work will not appear.)

(Thanks to Gosha Cherkasov for the pointer.)

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24 responses to “In Memoriam: John Searle (1932-2025)”

  1. Ned Block

    Searle was a pugilistic philosopher, much more interested in winning than in truth.

    Reply
    1. Charles Pigden

      Dan Dennett says much the same thing in his autobiography.

      Reply
  2. Herman cappelen

    John Searle was my supervisor for five years at Berkeley. I was working on what felt like a strange pair of topics then, the metaphysics of words and the semantics of quotation. John was deeply engaged. He would send me cassette tapes with comments, and I would listen to them on a Walkman. The tapes often came with little travel diaries, notes about the airport lounge he was in or where he had been skiing that day. It was so very John, serious philosophy with sharp suggestions, made livelier by charming irrelevancies. While I was at Berkeley he was writing The Construction of Social Reality, and I sat through two semesters of seminars where we talked through the manuscript as he was writing it. Those were the most fun and interesting seminars I ever had as a student.
    I loved his way of doing philosophy. He would start from a simple thought, something he was convinced of before any theory, and then build an modest but interesting framework around it. It always felt bottom up rather than top down. To me he was the natural improvement on the ordinary language movement. He was very sensitive to shared knowledge and to careful observation of ordinary practice, a bit like Kripke, but he did not stop there. He took those observations and built structures that were clear and playful at the same time. I once heard a famous but not very talented philosopher call him a “talented amateur.” In a way I think John would like that description. Start with what anyone can see, look closely at how we actually talk and act, and then do something smart with it. He was a kind genius at that.

    Reply
  3. Brian Skyrms

    Remembering John Searle:
    https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/03/22/the-making-of-the-new-left

    Reply
  4. Charles Pigden

    I’m reposting with amendments a comment from ‘Tim Crane interviews John Searle’ from 2014. Let’s start with a Searle quote from the said interview:

    ‘Formal modelling in philosophy, I think leads nowhere. That’s my main objection to contemporary philosophy: they’ve lost sight of the questions. It sounds ridiculous to say this because this was the objection that all the old fogeys made to us when I was a kid in Oxford and we were investigating language’

    Here is my response: There is much to admire in Searle’s work. I am a big fan of his stuff on the Social Construction of Reality. He has got a touch of old-philosopher’s arrogance but that’s understandable given his age and achievements, and even the present rant displays some healthy signs of intellectual humility. He is aware that that the stuff he finds dull may have merits to which he is blind, and although he is inclined to dismiss this possibility, he implicitly concedes that he may be wrong to do so. He is aware too that what he is saying sounds disconcertingly similar to what the old fogeys used to say when he was kid at Oxford investigating language – that the young people nowadays have lost touch with the real issues. But what he is perhaps less clearly aware of is that what he is saying NOW sounds disconcertingly similar to what the ‘kids at Oxford’ used to say against ONE of those old fogeys, namely Bertrand Russell. For what Searle has really got it in for is formal philosophy, that is philosophy that takes formal logic and formal semantics seriously and uses it to help solve philosophical problems. And the chief point at issue between Russell and his Oxford critics in the 1950s was whether formal methods were useful or appropriate in philosophy. Though he is careful not to over-generalise and is willing to acknowledge the existence of exceptions, Searle thinks that formal techniques are not much use, or at least not much use IN PHILOSOPHY. (Presumably he would concede the massive contribution that mathematical logic has made to modern technology, providing the intellectual underpinnings of the computing industry on which are now totally dependent. )
    Now obviously this is a large question and it is not to be settled by a few blog comments. But I would like to suggest ONE reason for thinking that Searle is mistaken. His own early work would have been much improved if he had ignored the Oxford orthodoxy of his day and had paid more attention to formal logic. His famous paper on ‘Is’ and ‘Ought’ is marred by a failure to distinguish between logical consequence and analytic entailment, between inferences that are valid (or invalid) in virtue of their STRUCTURE and inferences that are valid (or invalid) in virtue of their CONTENT. This means that he makes a hash out of formulating ‘Hume’s Law’ mushing together Hume and Moore, who were not arguing for the same things. (Another thing wrong with his original paper is that it is historically under-informed) It also means that he is not as clear as he needs to be about what it is that he has to prove to establish the existence of the Naturalistic Fallacy Fallacy. (namely the existence of analytic bridge principles linking ‘is’ and ‘ought’). For details see my ‘Hume on Is and Ought : Logic, Promises and the Duke of Wellington’ in the Oxford Companion to Hume and available in an uncut version on Academia.edu and PhilPpaers. (Excuse the plug people, but this really is relevant).

    Now if my criticisms of Searle are at least roughly right, here’s what follows. There is at least ONE big philosophical issue (the Is/Ought question), that by Searle’s lights is well-worth discussing, to which formal philosophy can make a major contribution. Indeed any attempt to solve the problem that ignores the formal issues is likely to be deficient.

    Obviously a single counterexample cannot refute a rough generalization of the kind that Searle is making, but if you can find a reasonable number of big philosophical questions which formal methods CAN help to solve, then you will have done enough to prove him wrong. I don’t think that this would be a particularly tall order.

    Reply
  5. BRYAN FRANCES

    When I was a grad student, I read a bunch of his work and learned some valuable things from it. But as he got older, he became one of those professors who thinks many issues are simple, and all the complexity talked about in the literature is horribly misguided. There should be a name for that attitude, since he’s hardly the only philosopher to have it. It’s not exactly overconfidence or arrogance, but related to both.

    Reply
    1. John Fischer

      A suggestion for the genus: “grumpy old man.”

      Now, for the species, involving the traits you describe. Sometimes I think, just “lazy.” In other moods I think the appropriate term is, “correct.”

      Reply
  6. Mark Couch

    I was an undergraduate student of Searle’s and he’s probably the reason I got into philosophy. Early on I took one of his classes on the mind and attended his lectures, which were always sprinkled with his personality. One of the things I liked was that he was a normal guy: he talked about skiing, he was funny, he made it seem like philosophy wasn’t just reserved for nerds or something. After this, I did an independent study with him on Wittgenstein and we met several times to discuss things. He always took time and answered my questions. At one point in his office, when I felt like I didn’t explain something well to him and I became sheepish, he told me I was doing fine and I asked good questions. (That comment probably gave me the confidence to think I should do more philosophy and was appreciated.) Later when he graded my paper he made several comments and was constructive throughout. Despite his influence, he was still willing to sit there and patiently work with this newbie undergraduate and I was thankful for that.

    Reply
  7. Jim Holt

    John Searle deserves huge credit for writing dozens of beautifully lucid–and, yes, pugilistic– pieces over the years for Bob Silvers at the New York Review of Books. Public philosophy at the highest level. His “deconstruction” of Derrida in the NYR was both just and funny. My personal contact with him was limited to a single occasion, when I sat next to him at a talk being given by the quantum philosopher Guido Bacciagaluppi at Berkeley in the fall of 2000. As we chatted before the talk, Searle told me he refused to believe there was a genuine distinction between countable and uncountable infinities. Well, I thought, ok. After the talk, when the question period began, Searle was the first to raise his hand. “I have two questions,” he said to Bacciagaluppi. “First, does quantum mechanics have anything to do with consciousness? Second, does quantum mechanics have anything to do with free will?” Bacciagaluppi paused, thought for a moment or so, and then replied that he leaned toward ‘no’ on both questions. “Good!” said Searle, who then got up and left.

    Reply
  8. John

    The more I know the fairer I think the criticisms of him are.

    But something that has to be said is that he was a singularly engaging speaker and champion for the relevance of philosophy. His philosophy of mind course was part of the cognitive science major, and he was passionate about responding to claims made in other fields. He really opened my eyes to philosophy’s scope.

    Notes from a lecture 20 years ago: “I think philosophers have done alright on the whole mind-body thing. I’d give us a B+. Maybe soon we can finally relax and have a beer.”

    Reply
  9. GALEN J STRAWSON

    John Searle was oddly rude to me the last time I saw him, in São Paulo in 2016, but he did give me a spectacular flower-power tie, which came all the way from Haight Ashbury, in 1967, when I was 15 (it could also be used as a headband). He also delivered an affecting description of what it was like to have a tutorial with my father P. F. Strawson at the memorial service held in Magdalen College in 2006: “I will try to describe to you what it was like for me to be tutored as an undergraduate by Peter Strawson. To begin with, he insisted on the essays a day in advance, something no other tutor had ever required of me. I typed the essays, never more than three or four pages, and he had read them by the time of my arrival. After the usual greetings we would sit down and he would begin, typically with something like the following. ‘Now it does seem to me, Searle, (we were not yet on first name terms) that you are essentially arguing as follows.’ Whereupon he would present an elegant, lucidly clear and powerful expression of what I had, in my fumbling way, been trying to say. ‘Yes, yes!’ I would cry out, ‘That is exactly it. Those are exactly my points.’ ‘Well, if that is so, it does seem to me that the argument is subject to the following four objections.’ Whereupon he would proceed to demolish the entire argument step by elegant step. And the odd thing was, that though none of my points was left standing, I did not feel in any way diminished or defeated. On the contrary, I was positively elated because it seemed to me then, as it does now, that Peter and I were engaged in a common intellectual enterprise, the most wonderful intellectual enterprise of all: philosophical analysis ….”

    Reply
  10. Daniel Kaufman

    My first encounter with Searle’s work came in the mid 1980’s at the University of Michigan, where “Minds, Brains, and Programs” was assigned a philosophy of mind course I took. While I was in graduate school at the CUNY Graduate Center, I was fortunate to take a seminar with Jerry Fodor, devoted entirely to “The Rediscovery of Mind,” which was in manuscript at the time.

    Searle was a very good writer and a first-rate thinker who was capable of speaking like a regular person. His anti-Computationalism was very influential in forming my own views in the philosophy of language and mind, which remain anti-computational and anti-“Strong AI thesis” to this day. And his “Construction of Social Reality” had a significant impact on my views in metaphysics, which also persist to this day.

    For me, he has been one of a handful of truly essential philosophers, alongside Fodor; Davidson; Anscombe; Ryle; and a few others. A major loss. RIP.

    Reply
  11. Robert Allen

    Dear Professor Leiter,

    Speaking of ‘grumpy old men,’ can we lay the whole ‘Intuition Pump’ methodology to rest with the good Professor Searle? After reading Aristotle, I am so didactically done (not that I’m teaching anyone these days but my children) with Chinese Rooms, Fake Barns, Caves/Matrices and, yes, even the beloved Frankfurt Cases of my youth. (Come to think of it, there were no such contrivances in Nietzsche or Sartre either, my intellectual heroes before I got into Analytic Philosophy.) Categories and Nicomachean Ethics, for example, which were textbooks, define Philosophy, its key terms. and only then proceed to get down to cases, drawn from real life.

    Reply
    1. Max Deutsch

      The Chinese Room Argument is not an ‘intuition pump’. Searle himself (utterly convincingly) denies that it is in his responses to commentary on the 1980 BBS article. I highly recommend reading the section of this response headed ‘Intuitions’ to anyone who still thinks that intuition pumping is part and parcel of the methodology of analytic philosophy, then or now.

      Reply
  12. Michael Schmitz

    I first encountered John Searle at the Free University in Berlin in 1990 when he was a Visiting Professor there and I a student. He exuded a nervous energy, pacing the stage, speaking freely, sprinkling his lectures with anecdotes and jokes. In the first lecture he said that next time he would give a two-minute refutation of Descartes. Coming from an academic tradition where people were proud to spend an entire semester on one sentence in Parmenides, I knew I was in for something completely different. I was intrigued and soon hooked. He was a great teacher and the best lecturer I’ve ever heard, very clear, but also passionate and engaging, never defensive. When somebody had asked a good question, he would prompt them to follow up: “Say some more!”
    Many years later I first had the opportunity to give a talk in front of him. I criticized his notion of what he calls the background, arguing that the relevant phenomena are not non-representational, but must be understood in terms of non-conceptual content.(https://www.academia.edu/1059670/The_background_as_intentional_conscious_and_nonconceptual)
    In response, he subjected me to a series of tough questions, but took my criticisms in good spirit. The next day he invited me to lunch and during the lunch to Berkeley, where I then became a frequent visitor to the Berkeley Social Ontology Group. In my experience, Searle was very supportive of many students and young philosophers and helped them like he helped me. And while he never pulled any punches in debates, he was neither mean, nor did he punch down or tried to pull rank. He reserved his sharpest attacks for people whose status was similar to his own and ideas and attitudes that he felt were non-serious, willfully obscure, pretentious, self-indulgent, or all of the above. He was genuinely appalled by such displays and valued intellectual honesty above all. “We have to keep them honest”, he would frequently say.
    As a thinker, he was both sharp and very systematic, but also down-to-earth, with the robust sense of reality Russell spoke of. He retained some traditional ideas about meaning analysis, but combined them with a Wittgensteinian therapeutic attitude towards at least many traditional philosophical problems and a naturalistic spirit of investigating underexplored areas such as collective intentionality or consciousness in close cooperation with science.
    In his best moments, he showed how to resolve apparently intractable philosophical problems by diagnosing and removing background assumptions shared by all camps, for example in the philosophy of perception. Even when he ultimately failed to do so, as I think he did concerning the mind/body-problem, he still often pointed us into the right direction, in this case towards biological naturalism and between the Scylla of consciousness fundamentalism and the Charybdis of reductionism.
    What will remain? It’s too early to say of course, but we are currently seeing a revival of the field of speech act theory, which he systematized after Austin, and the field of collective intentionality / social ontology that he co-founded with Margaret Gilbert and Raimo Tuomela, is thriving. And with the recently growing interest in animal and infant consciousness and our exploding knowledge of the brain, the field of consciousness studies is steadily moving towards Searle’s biological naturalism, which I suspect will soon be the mainstream view in philosophy of mind, if it isn’t already. So my hunch – which surely is biased – is that he will be remembered as a key figure in the demise of the functionalist/computationalist paradigm, who contributed seminal ideas to the study of mind, language and society.

    Reply
  13. Luka Yovetich

    Searle and T. Nagel were by far the 2 most appealing academic philosophers when I was forming my beliefs about philosophy and its role as a field of study. Helped suck me into the incredible world of academic philosophy, for which I will forever be grateful.

    Reply
  14. Dean C. Rowan

    Times of London published an extensive obituary a few days ago:

    https://www.thetimes.com/uk/obituaries/article/john-searle-obituary-philosopher-of-the-mind-who-was-sceptical-of-ai-qp2hsfdpx

    Reply
  15. Alex Segal

    In The Guardian obituary, Jane O’Grady contends that Searle persuaded Derrida to modify the claim “There is nothing outside the text”. Can anyone refer me to the statement of Derrida’s in which he articulates the modification that Jane O’Grady ascribes to him?

    Reply
    1. Dean C. Rowan

      I will guess that O’Grady is referring to Searle’s account on pp.159-60 of The Construction of Social Reality, in which he writes, “[I]n a subsequent polemical response to some objections of mine, [Derrida] apparently takes it all back: he says that all he meant by the apparently spectacular declaration that there is nothing outside of texts is the banality that everything exists in some context or other…” Searle cites to Derrida’s Limited, Inc. (a collection of pieces including those from and following the exchange with Searle), p.136.

      Reply
    2. Dean C. Rowan

      The relevant language from Limited Inc.: “The phrase which for some has become a sort of slogan, in general so badly understood, of deconstruction (“there is nothing outside the text”…) means nothing else: there is nothing outside context.”

      Reply
      1. Alex Segal

        This quotation from Derrida does not show that he thinks he has been persuaded by Searle to modify the well-known slogan. So if this is the statement of Derrida’s that Jane O’Grady has in mind, then her account is misleading.

        Reply
      2. Dean C. Rowan

        [WordPress won’t let me reply directly to Alex Segal’s 6:03 am reply to the Derrida language I quote, so I’ll reply here.] Indeed, Derrida goes on to write, “In this form, which says exactly the same thing, the formula would doubtless have been less shocking.” (Read the passage here: https://archive.org/details/limitedinc0000derr_i8i5/page/136/mode/2up.) At the very least, he did not want to appear to have revised his “formula.” Nevertheless, I would wager that O’Grady was relying exclusively on Searle’s own statement that Derrida “apparently takes it all back,” which would support her statement that “Searle persuaded Derrida to at least modify the claim.” I doubt that O’Grady examined Limited Inc. to confirm the nature of the modification. This seems to me to be symptomatic of the “dispute” itself, which involved two celebrity academics largely talking past each other. I have to admit that it was fun to watch at the time. The passages I quote from Limited Inc. appear in an Afterword titled, Toward an Ethic of Discussion, in which Derrida acknowledges “an invitation to decipher the rules, the conventions, the uses which dominate the academic space and the intellectual institutions in which we debate, with others but also with ourselves.” The Afterword, with its hyperbolic talk of “violence,” is redolent of Derrida’s wordy and defensive reply to the discovery of his friend Paul de Man’s wartime journalism in collaborationist newspapers. It was perhaps characteristic of Derrida’s polemical style when called upon to clarify or defend cryptic statements or vague positions to bemoan the “violence,” to query the emergence of “large questions inscribed in an exchange of arguments that is ostensibly so limited, even academic and ‘micrological,’ concerning the structure of speech acts, of intentionality, of citation, of metaphor, of writing and of the signature, of philosophy and of literature, and other similar matters.” With “ostensibly so limited” he seems be asking, “What’s the big deal?”

        Reply
  16. Jennifer Hudin

    There was no evidence whatsoever that he had sexual liaisons with students although there was at least a 6 month thorough investigation. The accusing girl in 2017 was not a student. She did not win her case against the university because there was no evidence. All of Searle’s email, letters and records were confiscated, along with all of my email. Nothing could be uncovered. But what this case does show is that Due Process is dead in academics and if a powerful university wants money from you (I had my own funds along with a large donation towards a Center banked at UCB), they will get it. That is what motivated this lawsuit, money.
    And rumors about sexual liaisons are merely that. I have found in Philosophy that almost every public academic figure in this field has a rumor about his/her sex life. About the charge that the university had been warned of Searle’s sexual trespasses, there was one woman who charged him. There was an investigation, a trial at which witnesses (even her colleagues) testified her allegations were false, and she lost her case.

    Reply
    1. Brian Leiter

      It is obviously false that “in Philosophy that almost every public academic figure in this field has a rumor about his/her sex life.” I never heard any rumors about sexual liasons with students about Searle’s colleagues Barry Stroud and Hubert Dreyfus, or his friend Thomas Nagel, among many others. There were no such rumors about David Lewis, Allan Gibbard, Alvin Goldman, or Jaegwon Kim. The list is quite long, actually, of prominent philosophers about whom there were no rumors at all about his/her sex life.

      Reply

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