Life
The second son of Geoffrey Langshaw Austin (1884–1971), an architect, and his wife Mary Bowes-Wilson (1883–1948), Austin was born in Lancaster. In 1922 the family moved to Scotland, where Austin's father became the secretary of St Leonard's School, St Andrews.
Austin was educated at Shrewsbury School and Balliol College, Oxford, holding classical scholarships at both.
He arrived at Oxford in 1929 to read Literae Humaniores ('Greats'), and in 1931 gained a First in classical moderations and also won the Gaisford Prize for Greek prose. Greats introduced him to serious philosophy and gave him a lifelong interest in Aristotle. In 1933, he got first class honours in his Finals.
After serving in MI6 during World War II, Austin became White's Professor of Moral Philosophy at Oxford.
He began holding his famous "Austin's Saturday Mornings" where students and colleagues would discuss language usages (and sometimes books on language) over tea and crumpets, but published little.
Austin visited Harvard and Berkeley in the mid-fifties, in 1955 delivering the William James Lectures at Harvard that would become How to Do Things With Words, and offering a seminar on excuses whose material would find its way into "A Plea for Excuses". It was at this time that he met and befriended Noam Chomsky.
He was president of the Aristotelian Society from 1956 to 1957.
Austin died at the age of 48 of lung cancer. At the time, he was developing a semantic theory based on sound symbolism, using the English gl-words as data.
Read more about this topic: J. L. Austin
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