Come fare cose con le parole

I happened to run into Bill Bryson the other evening on a deserted street somewhere in Geneva. On impulse, as one does, I mugged him and stole his latest manuscript. It turned out to be a potted history of philosophy. Here's an extract for your delectation. Once upon a time, there was a philosopher c Leggi tutto

Over this series of 12 lectures, Austin argues against the foundational assumption in analytic philosophy of language that the only forms of linguistic utterance that are worthwhile to study are assertive or descriptive in kind, and that the primary way by which to evaluate these is to determine the Leggi tutto

I do things with words. Dark, terrible things. Okay, now that the joke's out of the way, may I say that I enjoyed this book of rather heady philosophy quite thoroughly? Which isn't to say that I skipped through it merrily like a prodigy--it took quite a bit of slow reading, and reading aloud, and fli Leggi tutto

In saying "I'm finished," I both state a fact and perform an act - in this case announcing my accomplishment. In this book, Austin seeks to makes this distinction clear.

You can do a lot of things with words, but tragically you still can't get them to wash the dishes.

Austin has been critisized by many philosophers for not being philosophical enough, and as much as I can see their point I have to defend Austin. At the point that Austin gave these lectures anglo-american philosophy was full of so much nonsense - largely due to Frege's bizarre vocabulary (or possib Leggi tutto

attracted as I am to the charming circularity of sentences that "do" what they "say", austin loses me as early as p.9 with "I must not be joking, for example, nor writing a poem." will this theory of speech that cannot take jokes or poetry into account ever get beyond the most banal utterances of an Leggi tutto