John Searle
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John Searle was an influential American philosopher who spent most of his career at UC Berkeley developing theories about how the mind works, language functions, and what makes human consciousness distinct from artificial intelligence. His ideas matter because they shaped decades of debate about fundamental questions—such as whether computers can truly understand language or think like humans—that remain central to philosophy and artificial intelligence research today.
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John Rogers Searle (born July 31, 1932 in Denver, Colorado) is the Slusser Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley. He is widely noted for contributions to the philosophy of language and the philosophy of mind, and for his views on practical reason and the characteristics of socially constructed versus physical realities. He was awarded the Jean Nicod Prize and the Jovellanos Prize in 2000, and the National Humanities Medal in 2004. <a href="https://www.last.fm/music/Jo
Recent publications · Crossref
5 total works indexed
- Generalized Gradient Approximation Made Simple
· 1996 · cited 200,201x
- Highly accurate protein structure prediction with AlphaFold
· 2021 · cited 41,536x
- Gene Ontology: tool for the unification of biology
· 2000 · cited 36,305x
- Matplotlib: A 2D Graphics Environment
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John Rogers Searle (/sɜːrl/ ; July 31, 1932 – September 17, 2025) was an American philosopher widely noted for contributions to the philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, and social philosophy. He began teaching at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1959 and was Willis S. and Marion Slusser Professor Emeritus of the Philosophy of Mind and Language and Professor of the Graduate School until June 2019, when his status as professor emeritus was revoked after he was found to have engaged in sexual harassment and retaliation against a former student and employee, in violation of the university's sexual harassment policies.
As an undergraduate at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, Searle was secretary of "Students against Joseph McCarthy". He received all his university degrees, BA, MA, and DPhil, from the University of Oxford, where he held his first faculty positions. Later, at UC Berkeley, he became the first tenured professor to join the 1964–1965 Free Speech Movement.
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1932 births2025 deaths20th-century American male writers20th-century American philosophers21st-century American male writers21st-century American philosophersAlumni of Christ Church, OxfordAmerican consciousness researchers and theoristsAmerican epistemologistsAmerican metaphysiciansAmerican philosophers of cultureAmerican philosophers of language