John Austin
From Geography
John L. Austin (1911 - 1960) was a British philosopher, who is best known for his contributions to the philosophy of language. Together with Ludwig Wittgenstein, Austin is seen as one of the most influential figures in the linguistic philosophy.
Background
John Langshaw Austin was born on 26 March 1911 in Lancaster as the second child of the family. In his youth the family moved to Scotland, were his father got a job as secretary of lower school. At the age of 18 he went to Oxford university, were he studied the classical languages. During his studies he became strongly inspired by the work of philosophers and especially the work of Aristotles. After Word War Two, where he served the British M16, he came back to Oxford University to become the head of the Moral Philosophy department. Till his death in 1960 he gave lectures and published work, mostly in the discipline of the language philosophy. John Austin died at the age of 48 to the consequences of lung cancer (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2001).
Work
John L. Austin is the founding father of the theory of speech acts, he describes a speech act as an intentional action. It occurs because someone say something with a certain goal in mind (Zierhofer, 2002). Some examples of speech acts are questions, observations, orders and promises (Ernste, 18 september 2012, personal communication). An important element in this theory are the performative utterances, which are sentences that are not describing passively a certain reality, but are changing the reality they are describing (Austin, 1975). Our social life is a structured association of these speech acts. The theory of speech acts is later further developed by one of his students John Searle.
References
Austin, J.L. (1975). How to do things with words, second edition. Oxford university press: Oxford.
Ernste, H. (18 September 2012). Lecture about communicative turn: personal communication.
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2001). John Austin. Date of finding: 23 September 2012.
Zierhofer, W. (2001). Speech acts and space(s). Environment and Planning A 2002, volume 34, pages 1355-1372.
Page created by - Lars Paardekooper 23 September 2012
