Blackwell Reference Online

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Herbert Paul Grice was born on March 13, 1913, in Birmingham, England. He attended Corpus Christi College, Oxford, graduating in 1936. From 1938 until 1967 he held various fellowships and lectureships at St John's College. His time at Oxford was interrupted by nearly five years’ wartime service in the Royal Navy, first in the North Atlantic and later in Admiralty intelligence. In 1967, he moved to the University of California, Berkeley as Professor of Philosophy. He was elected to the British Academy in 1966, and gave the William James Lectures at Harvard in 1967, the John Locke lectures at Oxford in 1978, and the Tanner Lectures at Stanford in 1980. He died in Berkeley in August 1988, shortly before the publication of his first book, Studies in the Way of Words . Grice was one of the most gifted and respected philosophers of the second half of the twentieth century. He set impossibly high standards and was always reluctant to go into print – heroic efforts were required by editors and friends to extract from him the handful of papers he deemed worthy of publication – yet he exerted considerable influence through seminars and invited lectures. He worked on topics in Aristotle, metaphysics, ethics, and philosophical psychology; but his strongest influence was in the philosophy of language, where his thought continues to shape the way philosophers, linguists, and cognitive scientists ... log in or subscribe to read full text