Longworth, Guy (2012) John Langshaw Austin. In: Zalta, Edward N., (ed.) The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Stanford, CA : Metaphysics Research Lab, CSLI, Stanford University. ISBN 1095-5054

Abstract

John Langshaw Austin (1911–1960) was White's Professor of Moral Philosophy at the University of Oxford. He made a number of contributions in various areas of philosophy, including important work on knowledge, perception, action, freedom, truth, language, and the use of language in speech acts. Distinctions that Austin draws in his work on speech acts—in particular his distinction between locutionary, illocutionary, and perlocutionary acts—have assumed something like canonical status in more recent work. His work on knowledge and perception places him in a broad tradition of “Oxford Realism”, running from Cook Wilson and Harold Arthur Prichard through to J. M. Hinton, M. G. F. Martin, John McDowell, Paul Snowdon, Charles Travis, and Timothy Williamson. His work on truth has played an important role in recent discussions of the extent to which sentence meaning can be accounted for in terms of truth-conditions.

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