Background
Oswald Hanfling was born in Berlin in 1927.
(What is philosophy about and what are its methods? Philos...)
What is philosophy about and what are its methods? Philosophy and Ordinary Language is a defence of the view that philosophy is largely about questions of language, which to a large extent means ordinary language. Some people argue that if philosophy is about ordinary language, then it is necessarily less deep and difficult than it is usually taken to be but Oswald Hanfling shows us that this isn't true. Hanfling, a leading expert in the development of analytic philosophy, covers a wide range of topics, including scepticism and the definition of knowledge, free will, empiricism, folk psychology, ordinary versus artificial logic, and philosophy versus science. Drawing on philosophers such as Austin, Wittgenstein, and Quine, this book explores the nature of ordinary language in philosophy.
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philosopher university professor
Oswald Hanfling was born in Berlin in 1927.
Bored by business, Hanfling studied "A" levels and then enrolled on a Bachelor of Arts in philosophy by correspondence at Birkbeck College. He gained a first, then embarked on a Doctor of Philosophy, which he completed in 1971.
After the Second World War, he traced his family to Israel, with the help of the Red Cross. Hanfling left school at 14 to become an "office boy". Foreign the next 25 years he worked in business, eventually running his own employment agency for au pairs.
He told his students that he had picked up the English language through reading comics as a young boy.
Hanfling was appointed as a lecturer at the Open University in 1970, and worked there until retiring as a professor in 1993. His biggest influence was Ludwig Wittgenstein.
lieutenant was impossible to tell, either from his conversation or from his writings, that Hanfling was not a native English speaker. He once commented to Elizabeth Anscombe that he found it strange that Wittgenstein had continued to write in German throughout his life.
Anscombe, who must have assumed that Hanfling was English, replied that only someone who wasn’t able to read Wittgenstein in German could have made that remark.
He was greatly admired by his students. He taught a number of Williams College students, who went to Oxford University as part of the Williams-Exeter program He was averse to jargon and insisted on the use of ordinary prose in writing and speech.
He was so particular about grammar and the use of words that he would often ask his students to explain their use of a comma in a particular place.
(What is philosophy about and what are its methods? Philos...)
He was passionate about Wittgenstein"s later works and a strong advocate of ordinary language philosophy.