It was in the Oxford of Austin, Ryle and Strawson that John Searle
was shaped as a philosopher. It was in Oxford, not least through
Austin’s influence and example, that the seeds of the book Speech
Acts, Searle’s inaugural opus magnum, were planted.1
And it was in
Oxford that Searle acquired many of the characteristic traits that have
marked his thinking ever since. These are traits shared by many
analytic philosophers of his generation: the idea of the centrality of
language to philosophy; the adoption of a philosophical method
centred on (in Searle’s case a mainly informal type of) logical
analysis; the respect for common sense and for the results of modern
science as constraints on philosophical theorizing; and the reverence
for Frege, and for the sort of stylistic clarity which marked Frege’s
writings.
In subsequent decades, however, Searle has distinguished himself
in a number of important ways from other, more typical analytic
philosophers. While still conceiving language as central to
philosophical concerns, he sees language itself against the
background of those neurobiological and psychological capacities of
human beings which underpin our competences as language-using
organisms. He has embraced a radically negative stand as concerns