ABSTRACT
J.L.Austin appears to have shared with Socrates-or at least, with Plato’s version of Socrates-a conviction that writing was in some sense inimical to the proper pursuit of philosophic wisdom. His published texts are small in bulk and certainly far outweighed by the volume of secondary writing which has built up around them. Furthermore, they are couched for the most part in a style of offhand, colloquial observation which works to suggest a much larger background of tacit knowledge than writing-mere writingcan hope to comprehend. Among the commentators there is a widespread agreement that Austin’s texts come nowhere near conveying the authority, power and inspirational quality of his first-hand teaching and seminar talk. Roderick Firth echoes many of them when he writes: ‘It is unlikely that the philosophical genius of the late John Austin will ever be adequately appreciated by those who have merely read his words in print.’1 Nor, apparently, is there much hope of enlightenment for those who were privileged only to attend Austin’s lectures. ‘Brilliant’ though these sometimes were, to listen to them could only be a matter of feeling remote ‘reverberations’ of the analytic genius which left such a mark on his immediate disciples. J.O.Urmson (Austin’s literary executor) likewise takes it for granted that his was ‘a method of discovery and not of presentation’, such that the essential import of his procedures ‘could not be followed in writings’.2
