Austinian Themes

Abstract

This book offers a reconstruction of John L. Austin’s philosophy organized thematically. It explores his works comparing them with one another and comparing the views they express with their elaborations and developments in more recent philosophy. In dealing with speech acts, it relies not only on published work but also on Austin’s manuscript notes. It defends Austin’s speech act theory and his notion of illocution against some main criticisms. It reconstructs Austin’s responsibility-based conception of action drawing on his remarks on acts and actions. It explores Austin’s contributions to epistemology and the philosophy of perception (including his realist stance, anti-scepticism, presentational view of perception, and the roles that he assigns to knowledge in the dynamics of assertion). It explicates Austin’s claims on truth and the ways in which he deals with sense, reference, ‘family resemblances’, truth–falsity assessments, and context-dependency. It argues for a reading of Austin’s characterization of his Ordinary Language Philosophy as a ‘linguistic phenomenology’ that takes it to be analogous to Husserl’s phenomenology and adopt an epochē that does not isolate consciousness, but language. It approaches the Ordinary through the consideration of the by-default nature of the social bond and conversational cooperation as well as something that philosophers should be consistent with in their claims if they rely upon it in their everyday life. In the conclusions, it highlights recurrent aspects of Austin’s philosophy such as the opposition to dichotomies, the attention to intersubjectivity, the commitment to a ‘sober’ philosophy, and a strong sense of human situatedness.