J. L. Austin

From Philosopedia

J. L. Austin (28 March 1911 - 8 February 1960)

A philosopher of language, John Langshaw Austin was born in Lancaster and was educated at Balliol College, Oxford.

During World War II, he served in M16, the Secret Intelligence Service, following which at Oxford he was White's Professor of Moral Philosophy.

Like Ludwig Wittgenstein, he examined how words are used in order to find meaning, but he disavowed Wittgenstein's later philosophical views, according to A. C. Grayling's Wittgenstein. It was G. E. Moore that he said was his main influence.

Austin was president of the Aristotelian Society from 1956 to 1957.

Biographical Notes

Siobhan Chapman, of the University of Liverpool, described Austin in a 3 October 2003 sketch, the entire selection of which is found online at The Literary Encyclopedia:

John Langshaw Austin, known both during and since his lifetime as J. L. Austin, was the leading figure in the generation of young philosophers at Oxford immediately after the Second World War, and a prominent proponent of “ordinary language philosophy”. In linguistics, he is best known for his work on “speech acts”.

Austin was born in Lancaster on 26th March 1911, but moved with his family to Scotland soon after the First World War when his father, returning from war service, abandoned his career as an architect and became Secretary of St. Leonard’s School in St. Andrews. Austin was a high academic achiever, winning scholarships in classics to Shrewsbury public school in 1924 and from there to Balliol College Oxford in 1929. He was awarded First Class honours in 1933 and was almost immediately elected to a Fellowship at All Souls College. Austin was, from the start, a rigorous and gifted scholar, but he did not really make any impression as an original thinker in the early years of his career. His research appointment at All Souls afforded him leisure to study the history of philosophy, and he worked on the writings of philosophers such as Plato, Aristotle, Kant and Leibniz. In 1935, when he became Fellow and tutor at Magdalen College, he began teaching for the first time. For the rest of his life, he was to prove a popular and successful teacher. Although some students were alienated by his aloof and somewhat arch manner, others were inspired to something close to discipleship by these same qualities, as well as by his intellectual rigour and philosophical insight.

Perhaps the most significant influence on Austin’s philosophical development at this time was his membership of an informal discussion group meeting in the rooms of Isaiah Berlin in All Souls College. At these meetings Austin first encountered, and increasingly argued with his near contemporary A. .J. Ayer, already an important but notorious voice in philosophy. In 1936, Ayer published Language, Truth and Logic, introducing the ideas of logical positivism to the English-speaking philosophical world. He endorsed a version of verificationism, the doctrine that the only meaningful sentences, apart from necessary truths and the statements of mathematics and logic, are those that can be subject to an identifiable process of verification, or proof. The meaning of such a sentence is the process of observation that leads us to label the sentence either “true” or “false”. All other sentences are simply meaningless; they are “pseudo-concepts”, not amenable to scientific or philosophical study. Ayer enthusiastically endorsed the logical-positivist dismissal of statements of aesthetics, of metaphysics and, perhaps most controversially, of ethics and religion. Even statements about the material world could not be accepted at face value because they are subjective interpretations of the information we receive through our senses. Sentences about material objects must be “translated” into sentences about “sense data”, the only phenomena of which we have direct evidence, before they can be subjected to verification. Austin, like many of his philosophical contemporaries, was initially attracted by Ayer’s radical challenge to philosophical orthodoxy, and by the apparent clarity of analysis offered by verificationism. However, he became increasingly uneasy about some of the implications of Ayer’s position, particularly his dismissal of many of the expressions of everyday language as scientifically vague and ultimately meaningless. The two young philosophers engaged in long and intense discussions of these matters, although at the time Austin lacked a clearly defined alternative with which to counter Ayer. . . .

(See entry for A. J. Ayer.)

Works

Sense and Sensibilia. 1959. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1964.

Philosophical Papers. Ed. J. O. Urmson and G. J. Warnock. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1961, 1979.

How to do things with Words: The William James Lectures delivered at Harvard

University in 1955. Ed. J. O. Urmson. Oxford: Clarendon, 1962.