No. 9 (2016): Issue No. 9, April 2016 - Topis of Issue: Ordinary Language Philosophy

The great linguistic turn performed by the philosophical platforms that took language as their focus of research marked much of 20th Century intellectual history:this turn started in analytic philosophy, which became part of the Anglo-American philosophical tradition, while structuralism, semiology, and poststructuralism dominated the so-called Continental tradition. Ordinary language philosophy was an important episode in this turn: it was shaped by the philosophers gathered around the so-called “Oxford school” (Ryle, Strawson, Austin) and under the influence of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s late works. As such, ordinary language philosophy performed an internal critique and revision of logical positivism and logical atomism. Ordinary language philosophers, referring to Wittgenstein’s self-critique in his Philosophical Investigations, repudiated the argument about logic as the basis of human cognition of the world, and began exploring the grammatical structures of language. Philosophers such as Austin, but also his followers, such as American philosopher Stanley Cavell, repudiated the claim of the possibility of an ideal, non-historical, and logically completely coherent metalanguage and instead promoted their thesis of the historical determination of language, i.e. its variable criteria; in certain respects, ordinary language philosophy thus came close to deconstruction and poststructuralism.
With this focus issue, titled Ordinary Language Philosophy, the AM Journal wishes to examine the currency of ordinary language philosophy’s main thesis. We welcome all interdisciplinary contributions reinvestigating the philosophies of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s late works, John Austin, Stanley Cavell, and others. What was the unique place of ordinary language philosophy in the linguistic turn mentioned above? How did ordinary language philosophy influence contemporary debates in ethics and aesthetics? What is the relation between ordinary language philosophy and deconstruction, i.e. poststructuralism? We will especially welcome all texts on the relevance of ordinary language philosophy for contemporary art theory – the visual arts, as well as performing arts, film, music, and media and media culture.

Topic Issue Editor: Nikola Dedić

On the cover: Doplgener (Isidora Ilić i Boško Prostran), Fragments Untitled, since 2011