Dr Julia Tanney, Head of the Department of Philosophy, was a guest on today’s edition of In Our Time on Radio 4, a live BBC discussion series exploring the history of ideas, presented by Melvyn Bragg.
Julia engaged in a discussion Ordinary Language Philosophy, a school of thought that emerged in Oxford in the years following World War II, alongside Professor Stephen Mulhall (New College, Oxford) and Professor Ray Monk (University of Southampton).
With its roots in the work of Wittgenstein, Ordinary Language Philosophy is concerned with the meanings of words as used in everyday speech. Its adherents believed that many philosophical problems were created by the misuse of words, and that if such ‘ordinary language’ were correctly analysed, such problems would disappear.
The programme is available on the BBC’s iPlayer here:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b03ggc19