43 - Phenomenology and Ordinary Language Philosophy

Summary

By the second half of the twentieth century, Heidegger’s philosophical project (originating in and reacting against his early phenomenological masterpiece Being and Time) had long established him as part of the living present of Continental European intellectual life, and Wittgenstein’s later philosophical investigations (importantly hinging on a critique of his massively influential early work, the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus) had become sufficiently well known to conjoin with the work of J. L. Austin to form an increasingly dominant movement in the Anglophone philosophical world known as “ordinary language philosophy.”¹ On the face of it, however, these two towering figures and the philosophical schools they inspired not only differ significantly from each other; they each embody everything against which the other sets its face.