John Rogers Searle (born July 31 1932 in Denver, Colorado) is the Slusser Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley). He is widely noted for contributions to the philosophy of language and the philosophy of mind, and also for his account of social reality. He was awarded the Jean Nicod Prize and the Jovellanos Prize in 2000, and the National Humanities Medal in 2004.
Searle was also the first tenured professor to join the Free Speech Movement at UC Berkeley. He later published a book on that period of campus unrest, The Campus War: A Sympathetic Look At the University in Agony (1971).
He frequently comments on philosophical and political topics for the New York Review of Books. His reviews on the topic of consciousness were collected as The Mystery of Consciousness (1997).
Searle was educated at Christ Church, Oxford University on a Rhodes Scholarship. He often publishes under the name "J. R. Searle."
