Austinian Themes

Austinian Themes offers a reconstruction of philosophical views on several themes developed by J. L. Austin. Exploring Austin's work in detail through a series of thematically organized chapters, Marina Sbisa draws on both published work as well as unpublished manuscript notes to offer a defence of Austin's speech act theory, characterized by a specific notion of illocution, against some important criticisms. Sbisa offers a reconstruction of Austin's responsibility-based conception of action drawing on his remarks on acts and actions in How to Do Things with Words and in later papers. Exploring Austin's contributions to epistemology and the philosophy of perception (including his realist stance, anti-scepticism, and presentational view of perception), Sbisa analyses the roles that he assigns to knowledge in the dynamics of assertion. On the theme of truth, Austin's claims are expounded and explained as worthy of reassessment. Other chapters explore the ways in which Austin deals with sense, reference, 'family resemblances', truth-falsity assessments, and context-dependence. Austin's most famous statement of method, as outlining a 'linguistic phenomenology', is cast as analogous to Husserl's phenomenology in adopting an epoche which isolates language (rather than consciousness), a reading which helps to clarify several characteristic positions adopted by Austin. On metaphilosophical themes, Sbisa analyses the notion of ordinariness, distinguishing it from common sense and the endorsement of the 'Linguistic Turn', approaching it instead in terms of the by-default nature of the social bond and conversational cooperation. Various recurrent aspects of Austin's philosophy are illuminated: the opposition to dichotomies, the attention paid to intersubjectivity, the commitment to a 'sober' philosophy, and a strong sense of human situatedness.