This is the first collection of essays on J. L. Austin’s philosophy published by a major Anglophone press in nearly forty years. Rejecting the standard picture of him as an effectively obsolete “doyen of ordinary language philosophy”, the contributors show how Austin’s work can be brought to bear on issues that are on the top of today’s philosophical agenda, such as scepticism and contextualism, the epistemology of testimony, the generality of the conceptual, the viability of the semantics/pragmatics distinction, and issues in philosophical methodology. The connections made between Austin’s ph ... More

This is the first collection of essays on J. L. Austin’s philosophy published by a major Anglophone press in nearly forty years. Rejecting the standard picture of him as an effectively obsolete “doyen of ordinary language philosophy”, the contributors show how Austin’s work can be brought to bear on issues that are on the top of today’s philosophical agenda, such as scepticism and contextualism, the epistemology of testimony, the generality of the conceptual, the viability of the semantics/pragmatics distinction, and issues in philosophical methodology. The connections made between Austin’s philosophy and current debates provide new interpretations of his views and aim to demonstrate that his work deserves a more central place in mainstream philosophical discussion than it currently has. The collection also contains a substantial introduction that situates Austin’s thought in its original intellectual milieu and provides an overview of the many different ways in which his ideas have influenced later developments, in philosophy and elsewhere. Contributors are Avner Baz, Simon Glendinning, Martin Gustafsson, Mark Kaplan, Adam Leite, Benjamin McMyler, Jean-Philippe Narboux, and Charles Travis.