J. L. Austin 1911 – 1960

John Langshaw Austin was a British philosopher, the leading figure of post-war Oxford ordinary-language philosophy alongside Gilbert Ryle. As White's Professor of Moral Philosophy he conducted weekly Saturday-morning discussions whose patient attention to the ordinary uses of language reshaped post-war analytic thought. His posthumous How to Do Things with Words founded speech-act theory by analyzing utterances as actions, distinguishing locutionary, illocutionary, and perlocutionary force. Sense and Sensibilia dismantled sense-datum theories of perception. He died of cancer at forty-eight.

John Langshaw Austin was born in 1911 at Lancaster, the son of an architect and a writer of children's books. He read Greats at Balliol College, Oxford, was elected a fellow of All Souls in 1933 and a tutorial fellow of Magdalen the following year. During the Second World War he served in British military intelligence, played a major part in preparing the intelligence picture for the D-Day landings, and was rewarded with the OBE and the Croix de Guerre.

After the war he succeeded H. A. Prichard as White's Professor of Moral Philosophy at Oxford in 1952 and presided over the famous Saturday-morning meetings of young philosophers at which 'ordinary language' philosophy took its mature form. His major works are mostly posthumous: Philosophical Papers, Sense and Sensibilia (reconstructed from his Oxford lectures, 1962), and the 1955 William James Lectures at Harvard, published as How to Do Things with Words (1962).

Austin pioneered speech-act theory — the analysis of locutionary, illocutionary, and perlocutionary aspects of utterances — and the patient examination of the fine distinctions of ordinary English that he believed embedded the accumulated wisdom of generations of speakers. His influence on John Searle, on Stanley Cavell, on the philosophy of language, and on linguistic pragmatics has been deep and continuing. He died at Oxford in February 1960 of cancer at the age of forty-eight.