Now in paperback, Sandra Laugier's reconsideration of analytic
philosophy and ordinary language.
Sandra Laugier has long been a key liaison between American and European
philosophical thought, responsible for bringing American philosophers
such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Stanley Cavell to
French readers--but until now her books have never been published in
English. Why We Need Ordinary Language Philosophy rights that wrong
with a topic perfect for English-language readers: the idea of analytic
philosophy. Focused on clarity and logical argument, analytic philosophy
has dominated the discipline in the United States, Australia, and
Britain over the past one hundred years, and it is often seen as a
unified, coherent, and inevitable advancement. Laugier questions this
assumption, rethinking the very grounds that drove analytic philosophy
to develop and uncovering its inherent tensions and confusions. Drawing
on J. L. Austin and the later works of Ludwig Wittgenstein, she argues
for the solution provided by ordinary language philosophy--a philosophy
that trusts and utilizes the everyday use of language and the clarity of
meaning it provides--and in doing so offers a major contribution to the
philosophy of language and twentieth- and twenty-first-century
philosophy as a whole.
