Twentieth-Century Analytic Philosophy by Avrum Stroll

Author:Avrum Stroll [Stroll, Avrum]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Published: 2011-02-17T05:00:00+00:00

Ryle and Austin: The Golden Age of Oxford Philosophy 165

In Sense and Sensibilia wit and philosophical insight are inextricably mixed.

Then there are differences of another kind in the ways in which ‘looks like’ may be meant and may be taken. We are about to watch, from seats high up at the back of the stadium, a football match in which one of the teams is Japanese. I might say, (1) ‘They look like ants’; or

(2) ‘They look like Europeans’

Now it is plain enough that, in saying (1) I do not mean either that I am inclined to think that some ants have come on to the field or that the players, on inspection, would be found to look exactly, or even rather like ants. (I may know quite well, and even be able to see, that for instance they haven’t got that very striking sort of nipped-in waist).

(1962b:40)

Despite a vast number of passages like these, the impression existed during his lifetime that Austin was aloof and cold. Mistaken though it is, there may be reasons that explain this reputation. Compare Austin with Moore, for example. Austin was like Moore in being very much a family man. But unlike Moore, who effusively enjoyed eating and drinking, walking, gardening, talking with his friends, and playing the piano for them, Austin treated his home as a kind of shelter. He could entertain delight-fully if the occasion required it, but in general he did not need or want the distraction of many acquaintances. He married in 1941 and had four children, two daughters and two sons. The marriage and his family were sources of satisfaction and happiness that, as Warnock relates, “he found nowhere else, and I have no doubt that this devotion explains in a large measure the impression of detachment, of remoteness even, which he sometimes made in other settings.”

Austin’s death in February 1960, at the age of forty-nine, was unfore-seen and left a terrible gap at Oxford. Warnock’s description is very moving: “His fine-drawn features—his face, as Shaw said of Voltaire’s, was ‘all intelligence’—had for some months looked rather worn and tired; but in the end he was scarcely known to be ill before it was clear that he was dying.”

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