Mrs. Lucy Nusseibeh, the Director of the Institute of Modern Media (IMM) at Al-Quds is traveling to the United Kingdom to take part in the events being organized to mark the centenary year of birth of her father, the well-known British Philosopher J.L. Austin. During her trip she'll be attending a conference organized by Lancaster University on Austin on April 5th- 7th, which will show case different aspects of Austin's philosophy and works.
John Langshaw Austin (March 26, 1911 – February 8, 1960) was a British philosopher of language, born in Lancaster and educated at Shrewsbury School and Balliol College, Oxford University. Austin is widely associated with the concept of the speech act and the idea that speech is itself a form of action. Consequently, in his understanding, language is not just a passive practice of describing a given reality, but a particular practice that can be used to invent and affect realities. His work in the 1950s provided both a theoretical outline and the terminology for the modern study of speech acts developed subsequently.
Austin made another significant contribution to philosophy, as well, of a very different sort. In 1950, he published a translation of Gottlob Frege's Foundations of Arithmetic. Together with Peter Geach and Max Black's book Translations from the Philosophical Writings of Gottlob Frege, published in 1952, Austin's translation was what made Frege's writings available to the English-speaking world and thus helped establish Frege's important place in analytic philosophy. The translation is still widely used today.
Interested readers may browse the link below to read more on J.L.Austin, and/or click here to read one of his publications
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
And more on the conference that Lancaster University/Department of Politics, Philosophy and Religionis hosting on Austin.
