ABSTRACT
Austin died in February 1960, at the age of 48. He would have been 49 on 26 March of that year. Though comparatively young, he held at that time, and in fact had held for a good many years, a leading position among philosophers not only in Oxford-where he lived and taught-but in Britain, and to some extent In the English-speaking world as a whole. He had been elected in 1952 to one of Oxford’s only three (at that time) professorships of philosophy-a noteworthy election, in that the chair in question, that of the White’s Professor of Moral Philosophy, was ‘officially’ in a field in which he was only pretty marginally interested and had published nothing; it must have been felt that it would nevertheless have looked obviously wrong to elect anybody else, and fortunately the University had long countenanced considerable latitude in such matters. In 1955 he delivered, but by 1960 was still revising for possible publication, the William James lectures at Harvard.
