Search Contact
Ordinary Language Philosophy & Literary Studies Online

Teaching Sense and Sensibilia in a literature and philosophy course

When J. L. Austin delivered the lectures that became "Sense and Sensibilia" in 1947, he could not have anticipated how often the text would be taught to students expecting something closer to a literature seminar than an epistemology tutorial. The work sits at a curious midpoint: rigorous enough for analytic philosophy, attentive enough to ordinary language to seduce readers trained in close reading.

Across Australian universities, philosophy and literature usually occupy separate schools with little curricular overlap. At the University of Melbourne, Sydney, and Monash, philosophy sits within arts faculties while literature keeps to its own departments. Austin's posthumous attack on sense-datum theory gives mixed cohorts a shared text dense enough to reward careful exegesis and humane enough to invite the patient listening literary scholars have practised for decades.

Austin's attention to what we actually say when describing perception - phrases like "looks red" or "appears to be" - rewards the same granular care a literary critic gives to a single word's function. Students who slow down to register these shifts, and who occasionally consult a careful pronunciation guide to notice fine differences of utterance, begin to grasp why Austin labours over minor variations.

Australian academic culture, with its preference for plain speaking and scepticism toward ornament, tends to find Austin's voice sympathetic rather than alienating. Teaching the text well means resisting the temptation to treat it as either a piece of straightforward philosophical argument or as a quirky historical document.

The perceptual vocabulary problem

Austin's central complaint against Ayer and Price is that sense-datum theorists treat ordinary perceptual reports as if they could be straightforwardly reformulated as "appears" plus a quality plus an object. The mistake, he argues, is assuming that philosophical paraphrase preserves sense while stripping away surface. Once students grasp that Austin wages war on this assumption, they see why he spends pages on phrases like "looks green" or "feels cold."

This is where the literature classroom offers something. Literary students are usually alert to the way a phrase's force depends on context, register, and position in a larger utterance. A novel by Christina Stead or a story by Tim Winton often hinges on the difference between a word's dictionary meaning and its living use. Bringing that habit to Austin lets them feel the force of his examples in a way analytic training sometimes does not.

Contrasting Austin with Australasian traditions

The ordinary language philosophy Austin practised had a particular reception here, where John Passmore and later Frank Jackson worked in broadly empiricist traditions at the Australian National University and beyond. Teaching Austin in an Australian context offers a chance to trace the difference between the British ordinary language school and the more theoretical metaphysics that took root locally. Students can compare Austin's insistence on attending to actual usage with the generalist commitments of some local philosophers.

A seminar session might pair Austin's discussion of "looks" with a passage from Patrick White's The Solid Mandala or an essay by Germaine Greer, asking whether literary and philosophical writers here share Austin's suspicions about claiming to see things "directly." The comparison rarely yields tidy conclusions, but it dramatises how attention to ordinary language cuts across disciplinary lines.

Designing seminar questions for mixed cohorts

Mixed-cohort seminars run best when the questions reward both kinds of training. Vague prompts like "Do you agree with Austin?" polarise the room: literature students fall silent and philosophy students construct pro and contra arguments without first reading slowly. Better questions ask students to look at what Austin actually does with a sentence, then to do something analogous with a literary passage.

Discussion prompts that bring both sets of skills into play:

The fourth prompt lets students bring their disciplinary strengths to bear; the first three demand exegetical work that neither literature nor philosophy training alone can guarantee.

Assessment strategies that reward both skills

Standard critical essays tend to underweight the literary sensibility students bring. A useful alternative is a comparative close-reading exercise: set a paragraph of Austin alongside a paragraph of literary description and ask students to write up their observations in roughly 1,500 words. The form rewards care and the ability to articulate what one notices, and reflects Austin's conviction that philosophical claims must be tested against actual usage.

Assessment formats that have worked well in practice:

End-of-semester short-answer items can ask students to identify specific moves Austin makes and to deploy that skill on an unseen passage. The combination prevents the unit sliding into either a philosophy tutorial or a literature seminar.

Common pitfalls and how to avoid them

The most frequent problem is treating "Sense and Sensibilia" as a settled case rather than a working argument. Austin's editors constructed the text posthumously from lecture notes and student transcripts, and many readers stumble when they encounter what look like casual asides or repetitions. Students need to hear that the unevenness is part of its history, not evidence that the argument has failed.

A second pitfall is the assumption that ordinary language philosophy is a purely British preoccupation. In fact, philosophers and literary scholars across Australia have drawn on Austin's methods for decades. Pointing students to recent Australasian Association of Philosophy sessions, or to work at the University of Queensland on philosophical readings of Australian fiction, helps them locate themselves in a continuing conversation. A third risk is letting literary students drift into impressionism, since the book demands the same argumentative accountability that any analytic text does. Pairing readings with structured peer feedback keeps the standard high while preserving the hospitable atmosphere that draws literature students in.

Teaching Austin across the literature-philosophy boundary is, in the end, less a matter of clever curriculum design than of sustained attention to what the text actually does. Readers who slow down enough to follow Austin's twisting sentences often find themselves reading their own disciplinary habits with new care. If you are designing such a unit, the bibliographies and reading notes gathered at this site offer a sturdy starting point, and we welcome contributions from anyone running similar experiments.