- Lived:
- 1911–1960 · Lancaster, Oxford, and — decisively — wartime London
- Tradition:
- Ordinary language philosophy; the founder of speech-act theory
- The Big Idea:
- Saying is a kind of doing — many of our utterances don't describe the world, they act in it — and the fine distinctions buried in everyday language are precision instruments philosophy ignores at its peril.
- In their words:
- "Ordinary language... is the first word."
- If you remember one thing:
- The man who organized what the Allies knew about the Normandy defenses spent the rest of his short life demanding the same exactness about what we do with words.