Searle, John R. - Mind: A Brief Introduction

There are many recent introductory books on the philosophy of mind. Several give a more or less comprehensive survey of the main positions and arguments currently in the field. Some, indeed, are written with great clarity, rigor, intelligence, and scholarship. What then is my excuse for adding another book to this glut? Well, of course, any philosopher who has worked hard on a subject is unlikely to be completely satisfied with somebody else's writings on that same subject, and I suppose that I am a typical philosopher in this respect. But in addition to the usual desire for wanting to state my disagreements, there is an overriding reason for my wanting to write a general introduction to the philosophy of mind. Almost all of the works that I have read accept the same set of historically inherited categories for describing mental phenomena, especially consciousness, and with these categories a certain set of assumptions about how consciousness and other mental phenomena relate to each other and to the rest of the world.