Gastvortrag von em. Prof. Mark Kaplan (Indiana University, USA): „Understanding Austin's Way with Philosophy“ [Einladung]

Seminarraum VI der Theologischen Fakultät (Karl-Rahne-Platz 3, 1. Stock)

L. Austin is famous for having written as if what we say while doing philosophy has to accord faithfully with what we would say in ordinary circumstances. Most would say, “infamous”. The longstanding consensus is that Austin’s commitment to pursuing a philosophy that is faithful to “ordinary language” was fundamentally misguided—born of a failure properly to understand the nature of the philosopher’s project. But my brief is that this consensus rests on a misreading of Austin—that, once we read him properly, we can see that his way of pursuing philosophy was born, not of a misunderstanding of the philosopher’s project, but rather of a powerful critique of how that project has been conceived. 

Mark Kaplan is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at Indiana University. He is the author of Decision Theory as Philosophy (Cambridge 1996) and Austin’s Way with Skepticism: An Essay on Philosophical Method (Oxford 2018). He has published widely on Bayesianism, decision theory, and epistemological topics such as skepticism, degrees of belief, and the theory of knowledge.