Philosophical papers

The late J.L. Austin's influence on contemporary philosophy was substantial during his lifetime, and has grown greatly since his death in 1960. This is the first edition of which was published in 1961.
ALL Austin's previously published "work is here republished, except his translation of Frege's Foundations of Arithmetic and his reviews. 'Ifs and Cans' (1956) -was published in the Proceedings of
the British Academy, 'A Plea for Excuses* was his Presidential Address to the Aristotelian Society in 1956; 'How to Talk some simple ways' (1953) was also published in the Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society.
'Are There A Priori Concepts?' (1939), 'Other Minds' (1946), 'Truth' (1950), and 'Pretending* (1958) were all contributions to symposia of Joint Sessions of the Mind Association and the Aristotelian Society, and were published in the Supplementary Volumes of the Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society.
We thank the editors of these journals for permission to reprint. Three further papers are published here for the first time. 'The Meaning of a Word' was read to the Moral Sciences Club in Cambridge and to the Jowett Society in Oxford in 1940; 'Unfair to Facts' was read to the Philosophical Society in Oxford in 1954, and is a sequel to Austin's symposium on Truth, with P. F. Strawson and D. R. Cousin, in 1950. 'Performative Utterances' is a version, with minor verbal corrections, of an unscripted talk delivered in the Third Programme of the B.B.C. in 1956, and our thanks are due to the British Broadcasting Corporation for their permission to publish it here. This talk deals briefly and in outline with a group of
questions to which Austin had devoted much work, and on which he lectured both in Oxford and elsewhere at mud greater length.
It is hoped that his more detailed discussion ol these questions may also be published later.