A Timeline of Ordinary Language Philosophy and Literature

Ordinary language philosophy examines how words gain meaning in use, especially through familiar acts such as promising, naming, warning and describing. Literary studies asks the parallel question of poems, novels and films: how convention, context and reading shape interpretation. A timeline of key publications links these concerns, tracing a movement from linguistic analysis towards pragmatics, hermeneutics and performativity.

The history is not a clean break from earlier analytic philosophy. Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus appeared in German in 1921 and in English in 1922, while J. L. Austin’s essays on truth and ordinary usage prepared another path. Their different projects overlapped in a renewed attention to what speakers do with language.

Dates need care because books often develop from lectures, translations or posthumous collections. Philosophical Investigations appeared in 1953, Austin’s How to Do Things with Words in 1962, and several Cavell volumes moved between essays, lectures and responses to literary and philosophical works. The timeline therefore marks first publication rather than treating every edition as a separate event.

For Australian readers, the route meets a distinctive scholarly landscape: Melbourne’s university seminars and Text Publishing events, Canberra’s ANU and National Library holdings, and Sydney’s State Library of New South Wales and literary programmes. AustLit supplies a local market view by recording editions, reviews and publishing histories. These institutions make the timeline useful for seminars, collections and research networks.

Early roots of the linguistic turn

Early roots of the linguistic turn begin with Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, which separated propositions from other uses of language and sharpened the question of logical form. The linguistic turn later widened the object of philosophy from formal systems to public speech, making interpretation and ordinary practice central to philosophical work.

Austin’s “Truth” (1936), revised in 1940, and Sense and Sensibilia (1946) developed sustained analyses of ordinary words and their use. P. F. Strawson’s Individuals and Things (1959) then connected philosophical description with reference, implication and the social settings of speech.

Austin, Wittgenstein, and ordinary usage

Two landmarks dominate this phase. Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations (1953) replaced a single theory of meaning with language games, forms of life and the grammar of concepts. Austin’s How to Do Things with Words (1962), based on his 1955 Harvard lectures, distinguished locutionary, illocutionary and perlocutionary acts, giving precise tools for discussing what utterances perform.

Literary consequences were immediate. Austin’s “A Plea for Excuses” (1956) showed how apparently non-literary classifications can conceal rhetorical choices, while the posthumous “The Word as a Medium” (1989) treated literary utterance as a distinctive kind of action. Together these works connect ordinary language philosophy to poetics without making literature a decorative example.

Cavell and the ordinary in literature

Stanley Cavell brought ordinary language into an explicitly literary and moral setting. Must We Mean What We Say? (1969) examined the claims embedded in ordinary words, showing how philosophical disputes often become ethical struggles over honesty, avoidance and responsibility. His reading of Austin and Wittgenstein treated usage as evidence of a shared public world.

The Claim of Reason (1976) extended that method into literature, film and criticism, while The Senses of Walden (1972) showed how philosophical text can become a record of sensibility and self-correction. In Quest of the Ordinary (1988) gathered essays on ethics, drama and modernism, and This New Yet Unapproachable America (1989) paired ordinary-language ethics with American literary criticism.

Pragmatics, speech acts, and interpretation

Speech-act theory supplied a new vocabulary for reading. Austin’s terminology was developed by John Searle in Speech Acts (1969), while Strawson’s “Intention and Convention in the Theory of Speech” (1964) questioned rule-based accounts of meaning. Donald Davidson’s “A Nice Derangement of Epitaphs” (1977) used ordinary poetic usages to disturb fixed distinctions, and “Communication and Convention” (1982) framed shared meaning as a practical achievement.

Wayne Booth’s The Rhetoric of Fiction (1961), Hans-Georg Gadamer’s Truth and Method (1960) and Umberto Eco’s The Role of the Reader (1979) brought rhetoric, hermeneutics and reception into the same conversation. Richard Rorty’s Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979) then placed the linguistic turn within a broader challenge to foundationalism, redirecting philosophy towards interpretation, conversation and historical change.

Poetry, writing, and philosophical criticism

Writing and difference created another line of development. Jacques Derrida’s “Signature Event Context” (French, 1972; English translation, 1982) examined how context can never function as a perfectly self-contained frame, while Judith Butler’s “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution” (1988) applied speech-act ideas to social and embodied performance. Austin’s word-as-medium essay and Davidson’s “What Metaphors Mean” (1978) similarly challenged a purely informational model of language.

Wittgenstein’s Lectures on Aesthetics (1992) brought aesthetic response into dialogue with his remarks on pictures, form and pain. Cora Diamond’s The Importance of Not Being Too Bothered (1988) read philosophical parables and difficult literature as tests of ethical attention. These works show how the ordinary can become rigorous through close reading rather than through a simplified appeal to common usage.

Recommended landmarks for a chronological reading path

A selective reading path can preserve chronology while making the cross-disciplinary exchanges visible:

• Read the 1922 English Tractatus for the early problem of propositional meaning.
• Follow it with Austin’s Sense and Sensibilia (1946) and his 1956 “A Plea for Excuses.”
• Use Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations (1953) to test the language-game framework.
• Pair Austin’s How to Do Things with Words (1962) with Searle’s Speech Acts (1969).
• Read Cavell’s Must We Mean What We Say? (1969) alongside literary criticism.
• Move to The Claim of Reason (1976), Davidson’s 1977 essay and Gadamer’s Truth and Method.
• Finish with Cavell’s In Quest of the Ordinary, Diamond’s 1988 collection and Wittgenstein’s Lectures on Aesthetics (1992).

This sequence is a recommendation, not a syllabus: interleave primary texts with the reviews, conference reports and bibliographies in the site’s archive. Comparing editions and translators also reveals how terminology and interpretive habits travelled across English-language publishing.

Explore the OLP and Literary Studies archive

OLP & Literary Studies Online brings this route into a scholarly digital setting. Its archive includes publication news, reviews, lectures, symposia, conference listings and calls for papers, alongside curated bibliographies and dedicated resources for students and scholars working on Cavell and Wittgenstein.

Start with one landmark, follow its references through the archive, and use AustLit to locate relevant Australian editions and reviews. Then browse the current listings and select a lecture, symposium or call for papers to extend the reading path into active research. The archive is ready to guide the next stage of your work.