J. L. Austin Quotes

Philosophy can only be approached with the most concrete comprehension.

I fear that, in the end, the famous debate among materialists, idealists, and dualists amounts to a merely verbal dispute that is more a matter for the linguist than for the speculative philosopher.

I like Jacques Derrida; I think he's funny. I like my philosophy with a few jokes and puns. I know that that offends other philosophers; they think he's not taking things seriously, but he comes up with some marvellous puns. Why shouldn't you have a bit of fun while dealing with the deepest issues of the mind?

From a linguistic point of view, you can't really take much objection to the notion that a show is a show is a show.

Parts exist only for purposes of figuring and describing, and as we figure the world out we become confused if we do not remember this all the time.

The connection between our knowledge and the abyss of being is still real, and the explication must be not less magnificent.

Philosophy is explicitness, generality, orientation and assessment. That which one would insinuate, thereof one must speak.

Well, what does "good" mean anyway? As Wittgenstein suggested, "good," like "game," has a family of meanings. Prominent among them is this one: "meets the criteria or standards of assessment or evaluation."

In my writing I even question the universe; I wonder out loud if it is real, and I wonder out loud if all of us are real.

I see philosophy as a fairly abstract activity, as concerned mainly with the analysis of criticism and concepts, and of course most usefully of scientific concepts.

I'm apt to get drunk on words...Ontology: the word about the essence of things; the word about being.

Is the ground a philosophical concept? Has mind a relationship to the ground? Is it an idea to be investigated? Is the ground put together by thought?

For the only way one can speak of nothing is to speak of it as though it were something, just as the only way one can speak of God is to speak of him as though he were a man, which to be sure he was, in a sense, for a time, and as the only way one can speak of man, even our anthropologists have realized that, is to speak of him as though he were a termite.

My bag is approaching something and taking it to another place. Like words-you take a word and by the time you've finished with it, you milk it and you go through the emotion of what it is, what it means there and then.

Each of the parts of philosophy is a philosophical whole, a circle rounded and complete in itself. In each of these parts, however, the philosophical Idea is found in a particular specificality or medium. The single circle, because it is a real totality, bursts through the limits imposed by its special medium, and gives rise to a wider circle. The whole of philosophy in this way resembles a circle of circles. The Idea appears in each single circle, but, at the same time, the whole Idea is constituted by the system of these peculiar phases, and each is a necessary member of the organisation.

There is philosophy, which is about conceptual analysis - about the meaning of what we say - and there is all of this ... all of life.

Philosophy is the thoughts of men about human thinking, reasoning and imagining, and the real values in human existence.

The Mutakallemim... apply the term non-existence only to absolute non-existence, and not to absence of properties. A property and the absence of that property are considered by them as two opposites, they treat, e.g. , blindness and sight, death and life, in the same way as heat and cold. Therefore they say, without any qualification, non-existence does not require any agent, an agent is required when something is produced.

But if men would give heed to the nature of substance they would doubt less concerning the Proposition that Existence appertains to the nature of substance: rather they would reckon it an axiom above all others, and hold it among common opinions. For then by substance they would understand that which is in itself, and through itself is conceived, or rather that whose knowledge does not depend on the knowledge of any other thing.

What is reasonable is real; that which is real is reasonable.

We must think things not words, or at least we must constantly translate our words into the facts for which they stand, if we are to keep to the real and the true.

Let us affirm what seems to be the truth, that, whether one is or is not, one and the others in relation to themselves and one another, all of them, in every way, are and are not, and appear to be and appear not to be.

We must wish either for that which actually exists or for that which cannot in any way exist or, still better, for both. That which is and that which cannot be are both outside the realm of becoming.

... Philosophy proper is a subject, on the one hand so hopelessly obscure, on the other so astonishingly elementary, that there knowledge hardly counts.

Without knowing myself, I have no real basis for thinking.