Postwar Oxford Philosophy

Catalog description

After the Second World War, certain Oxford philosophers resolved to reflect on our ordinary talk and ordinary conduct as the key to philosophical reflection. They rejected the grand programmatic efforts of prewar philosophy - utilitarianism, existentialism, logical positivism - to purge philosophy of metaphysical excess, arguing that these "isms" misrepresented the real logic of our language and conduct just as badly as the older metaphysical systems did. Three things contributed to this reorientation of philosophical ambition: the wartime experience of men returning to philosophy from life-changing forms of military and public service, the entry of substantial numbers of women into academic philosophy for the first during the war, and the broadly therapeutic approach to philosophical difficulties practiced at Cambridge since the 1930s by Ludwig Wittgenstein. This course examines two important efforts to resume work on the grand prewar philosophical programs at Oxford and to explore two enduringly important products of Oxford ordinary language philosophy: (i) J.L. Austin's account of speech acts, and (ii) the effort to free modern moral philosophy from its preoccupation with moral laws, in postwar work by Elizabeth Anscombe, Iris Murdoch, and Philippa Foot. We will read works by these philosophers and gain an understanding of this revolution in analytical philosophy.