Piled on my study floor — part of the detritus from clearing my faculty office — are some box files containing old lecture notes and the like. I’m going through, trashing some bundles of pages and scanning others for old times’ sake. (By the way, I can warmly recommend PDFscanner to any Mac user).
In particular, there is a long series of notes, some hundreds of pages, from a philosophy of language course that I must have given in alternate years, back in Aberystwyth. The set is dated around 1980 and would have been bashed out on an old steam typewriter. Those were the days. Some of the notes now seem misguided, some seem oddly skew to what now seem the important issues (such are the changes in philosophical fashion). But some parts even after all this time seem to read quite well and might be useful to students: so I’ll link a few excerpts — either in their raw form or spruced up a bit — to the ‘For students’ page. Here, for example, is some very introductory material on Grice’s theory of meaning. Having read too many tripos examination answers recently claiming e.g. that Searle refutes Grice, these ground-clearing introductory explanations might still provide a useful antidote!