Background
John Langshaw Austin was born in England on March 3, 1790.
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John Langshaw Austin was born in England on March 3, 1790.
In 1924 John Langshaw Austin entered Shrewsbury School with a scholarship in classics. His distinguished work enabled him to win a scholarship in classics to Balliol College, Oxford.
John Langshaw Austin became a barrister in 1818, but was fitted for practice by neither health nor disposition.
To prepare himself before it opened he went to Germany where he developed a lasting admiration for the Prussian legal scholar Frederich Carl von Savigny. Austin's lectures at London opened hopefully in 1828, but he was soon disappointed. His style was arid and too tightly woven, and his audience dwindled. He abandoned the course in 1832 and lived the rest of his life in retirement.
With ingenuity, subtlety, and wit, Austin developed strategies to collect and classify the abundance of words, idioms, and metaphors which are ordinarily invoked in discussions having a philosophical interest. Austin's last work, How to Do Things with Words, published posthumously, was based on the William James lectures which he gave at Harvard University in 1955.
Perhaps today the most valuable part of his work is not the more famous Province of Jurisprudence but the analysis of legal concepts presented in his later lectures.
Quotations:
"I had to decide early on whether I was going to write books or to teach people how to do philosophy usefully."
"I was born out of time. I should have been a schoolman of the twelfth century or a German professor."
John Langshaw Austin's style was arid and too tightly woven, and his audience dwindled. His reputation has fluctuated with the changing fashions of thought. But he has always attracted careful minds and from him sprang the theories of Hans Kelsen and the Vienna School of Jurisprudence.
Austin was married to Sarah Taylor and became neighbours and close friends with Jeremy Bentham and James and John Stuart Mill.
