Dries Daniels

Topic: Austin in Context

Few works of 20th century philosophy have enjoyed as fruitful an afterlife as J.L. Austin’s How To Do Things With Words, which not only heralded in a new set of objects of scrutiny in the Philosophy of Language in the Anglo-American tradition, but also was taken up in that tradition’s many abroads – spawning debates in structuralist semantics on the continent, in social and political theory, in the methodological literature of the humanities, or in contemporary feminist philosophy and gender studies. In this class we shall (a) try to understand how key concepts such as ‘performative’, ‘illocutionary act’, or ‘felicity’ were coined in response to pressures arising from early 20th century philosophical debates about issues in epistemology and moral theory, and (b) try to track how the operating logic of such concepts changes when they are taking out of their native habitat and set to work in some of the radically different contexts mentioned above.