ONTOLOGICAL SUBJECTIVITY IN JOHN SEARLE'S PHILOSOPHY OF MIND

Authors

  • Tárik de Athayde Prata UFC

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.5216/phi.v12i2.3386

Keywords:

subjectivity, dualism, mind-body problem

Abstract

This paper contains an analysis of a famous criticism from John Searle on materialist tradition. This tradition uses to ignore or even refuse the subjectivity of mental phenomena. This paper examines Searle’s strategy to defend this subjectivity, refusing the essential character of behavior to the mental aspect (section II), distinguishing subjective and objective in epistemic and ontological senses (section III) and showing his solution to the problem of other minds (section IV). However, his attempt to obtain an indirect access to subjective mental phenomena through causal explanations (section V) of these phenomena by brain processes is not enough to integrate the ontological subjectivity in our scientific worldview, once that this supposed ontological irreducibility from subjective to objective phenomena seems to result in the conclusion that mental phenomena are something beyond natural reality.

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Author Biography

Tárik de Athayde Prata, UFC

Trabalha como pesquisador e docente no departamento de filosofia da Universidade Federal do Ceará (com bolsa de DCR). Possui graduação em Psicologia pela Universidade Federal do Ceará (1999) e mestrado em Filosofia pela mesma instituição (concluído em 2002). É doutor em Filosofia pela Ruprecht Karl Universität Heidelberg, na Alemanha (título obtido em 2007), com uma tese sobre a filosofia da mente de John R. Searle. Atualmente desenvolve projeto de pesquisa com bolsa de Desenvolvimento Científico Regional (DCR) do CNPq em convênio com a FUNCAP. Tem experiência na área de Psicologia do Desenvolvimento, Filosofia da Mente e Filosofia Analítica

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Published

2009-02-20

How to Cite

DE ATHAYDE PRATA, Tárik. ONTOLOGICAL SUBJECTIVITY IN JOHN SEARLE’S PHILOSOPHY OF MIND. Philósophos a journal of philosophy, Goiânia, v. 12, n. 2, 2009. DOI: 10.5216/phi.v12i2.3386. Disponível em: https://revistas.ufg.br/philosophos/article/view/3386. Acesso em: 5 dec. 2025.

Issue

Vol. 12 No. 2 (2007): Philosophy of Language and mind

Section

Artigos Originais

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