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Continuing on How to Do Things with Words (lectures from 1955), covering lectures 5–9.
Austin tries and fails to come up with a way to grammatically distinguish performatives from other utterances, and so turns to his more complicated system of aspects of a single act: locutionary, illocutionary, perlocutionary. In doing so, he perlocutionarily blows our minds.
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Interesting to hear your personal reactions at the end. Although it might have been underwhelming for you to study these lectures, every second of your discussion about it was stimulating. A small percentage of your episodes are hard for me to get through, because I’m not interesting in political talk, but those are the best episodes for some fans. This podcast has something for everyone, many things for most people, and its versatility was clearly displayed over the course of the last two episodes. Episode 185, Ethics in Homer’s “Odyssey,” was epic, and 186 was a real treat. Love when you guys get analytic! Thanks for doing it, and it’s nice that you represent all aspects of philosophy, making things you find boring to read transfixing for us to hear
Thank you Christos!
I was surprised, too, to hear the somewhat disparaging comments you all made about Austin’s lectures at the end of the podcast—your discussion throughout was so careful and attentive and (I thought) interested. Anyway, this was one of my favorite of all your podcasts. A couple of responses to questions in the podcast: at around the 50:00 mark, Wes and Seth wonder about speech acts that could work somewhat like performatives but without the conventional constraints that determine performatives (“handshakes and having sex”). Stanley Cavell, the most creative and profound of Austin’s students, wrote an essay that explores this matter called “Performative and Passionate Utterance” (in Philosophy the Day After Tomorrow, Harvard, 2005). It is a beauty. Also, near the end of the podcast you all wonder how many people were attending Austin’s lectures by lecture 12. Cavell, who was there, says this about Austin and his audience: “In the last two paragraphs of the last of the twelve lectures that make up How to Do Things With Words, he announces, hailing us in farewell: ‘I have as usual failed to leave enough time in which to say why what I have said is interesting.’ And in the next sentence he instances a topic he says philosophers have always been interested in. It is sufficiently obvious that he takes it as inarguable that the philosophers’ interest, set beside the twelve hours of fascinating detail he has offered, is boredom itself. Austin says the lectures were bound to be a little dry and boring; but he was saying it mostly to the wrong parties. His first lecture had attracted several hundred people; by the last half dozen we were down to a core of some twelve to fifteen souls, and not all of these few were happy. But this only means that not everyone is interested in the need for revolution” (“The Politics of Interpretation”).
another good close reading, thanks fellows.
https://ndpr.nd.edu/news/rida-searle-deconstruction-and-ordinary-language/