There is a standard story told about the rise and fall of ordinary language philosophy: it was a widespread, if not dominant, approach to philosophy in Great Britain in the aftermath of World War II up until the early 1960s, but with the development of systematic approaches to the study of language—formal semantic theories on one hand and Gricean pragmatics on the other—ordinary language philosophy more or less disappeared. In this paper we present quantitative evidence to evaluate the standard story (...) of the rise and fall of ordinary language philosophy, building on the topic model of over 30,000 philosophy articles in Weatherson (2022). Using a combination of qualitative judgment and a topic-model-based measurement of similarity between individual articles, we find evidence that supports the first part of the standard story, according to which ordinary language philosophy arises in the 1940s, peaks between the early 1950s and the late 1960s, and then rapidly declines. But we argue that there is also evidence of a "new wave" of ordinary language philosophy in the early 21st century that defies the second part of the standard story. (shrink)

Rachael Wiseman has argued that we cannot make sense of G.E.M. Anscombe’s Intention unless we recognise that it is an “exemplification of [Wittgenstein’s] grammatical investigation”. While Wiseman is alive to the Wittgensteinian nature of Anscombe’s method, and to her deep Wittgensteinian sympathies, she is not preoccupied with the question of influence. This is the question I am concerned with in the current paper. I argue that in focusing on the concept of intention, Anscombe was homing in on a pivotal concept (...) in Wittgenstein’s later philosophy, and that most of the basic elements of her account were being worked out by Wittgenstein during the period when she was his pupil. However, as Anscombe worked through Wittgenstein’s idea’s afresh, in her own more systematic and analytic mode of philosophical investigation, she often cast ideas that were sometimes merely nascent in Wittgenstein’s work in a new light. Moreover, some of her most seminal ideas had their origin in concerns which she did not share with Wittgenstein and were entirely original to her. (shrink)