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Hello, in the years after the Second World War, a small group of British philosophers

emerged who were obsessed with a language, inspired by the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein

and the Austrian genius who had dominated British philosophers

since the 1920s, they argued that the only way to analyze philosophical problems was by

analyzing language. Over the next 20 years thinkers including Jay Lawson and Gilbert Royal turned their attention to what became called ordinary language.

They argued that most philosophical problems are caused by ambiguities and our use of words and that these problems would disappear if only we could

understand and use language more rigorously.

The heyday of what also became known as the Oxford philosophy, as Oxford philosophy, lasted

only 20 years, but left a lasting impression.

We need to discuss ordinary language philosophy and his influences are Stephen Mulhall,

Professor of Philosophy at New College Oxford, Ray Monk, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Southampton,

and Julia Tani, Reader in Philosophy of Mind at the University of Kent.

Stephen Mulhall, would you begin by giving us a bit more of an idea of what ordinary language

philosophy is about the sort of questions it examines?

Sure, well as you were saying it really was the dominant mode in British philosophy from the 30s when it took root in

Cambridge and then in Oxford until probably the 1970s I think and I think the best way of

understanding it is really as a kind of late phase in the history of the analytical tradition in philosophy which began at the beginning of the 20th century and it resembles the earlier phases in that tradition in that it takes its primary business to be the clarification of the nature and the structure of our means of representing reality.

And the assumption is that if we do engage in that

clarifacatory job we'll actually discover something about the nature of that

reality. But what we also discover, and this is certainly another continuity with the whole of the analytical tradition,

...