cause children’s play was one of the best sources of material for
philosophy. If the archetypal philosophical idealist was the
pre-Socratic Greek Thales, so absorbed by the heavens that he
fell into a ditch, then Austin willingly descended into the ditch:
the valley of our rich, self-contradictory everyday behavior.
Austin’s influence in legal study has been great, since he exam-
ined so many concepts that the law holds dear, including the
involuntary, the intentional, and the accidental.^4
Austin displays a bemused, inquisitive rigor in his phi-
losophical essays. He believes in the power of circumstances to
govern the words we use, rendering them effective or not. He
remarks, “We may plead that we trod on the snail inadver-
tently; but not on a baby: you really ought to look where you
are putting your great feet” (Papers 194 – 95 ). “Of course,” he
adds, “it was (really), if you like, inadvertence.” But this plea
works only for more trivial situations (as with the snail); it is
not going to be allowed here, with the crushed baby in full
view.
Austin’s diagnosis of the occupational disease of philoso-
phers focuses on their desire for the “incorrigible statement,”
something that will be true under all circumstances. (The rest
of us share the disease at times; philosophers are not merely
misguided, but usefully representative.) In his essay “A Plea for
Excuses,” for example, Austin remarks that philosophers think
they know what they mean when they speak of performing an
action. In fact, they tend to reduce all action to the (appar-
ently) simplest cases. (Simple cases make bad law.) Austin
writes that we assimilate actions “one and all to the supposedly
most obvious and easy cases, such as posting letters or moving
fingers, just as we assimilate all ‘things’ to horses or beds” (Pa-
pers 179 ). In this way, Austin kicks against the ideas and uni-
versals that philosophy so often trades in. He is, before Der-
Plato, Austin, Nietzsche, Freud 159