[Revised entry by Guy Longworth on June 9, 2025.
Changes to: Main text, Bibliography]
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…
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