john searle

• "...a very curious thing has happened in the past two or three decades - the philosophy of mind has moved to the centre of philosophy. several other important branches of philosophy, such as epistemology, metaphysics, the philosophy of action and even the philosophy of language, are now treated as dependent on, and in some cases even as branches of, the philosophy of mind. whereas 50 years ago the philosophy of language was considered 'first philosophy', now it is the philosophy of mind. there are a number of reasons for this change, but two stand out.
  
  first, it has become more and more obvious to a lot of philosophers that our understanding of the issues in a lot of subjects - the nature of meaning, rationality and language in general - presupposes an understanding of the most fundamental mental processes. for example, the way language represents reality is dependent on the more biologically fundamental ways in which the mind represents reality and, indeed, linguistic representation is a vastly more powerful extension of the more basic mental representations such as belief, desires and intentions.
  
  second, the rise of the new discipline of cognitive science has opened to philosophy whole areas of research into human cognition in all its forms. cognitive science was invented by an interdisciplinary group, consisting of philosophers who objected to the persistence of behaviorism in psychology, together with like-minded cognitive psychologists, linguists, anthropologists and computer scientists. i believe the most active and fruitful general area of research today in philosophy is in the general cognitive science domain."
  
  john searle. 1999. the future of philosophy. philosophical transactions: biological sciences. 354 (1392) pp. 2069-2080.