1 - The Marriage of Self and World
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 October 2011
Summary
WITTGENSTEIN, CAVELL, AND SKEPTICISM
This book is about a tradition in American philosophy, running through the writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson, William James, and John Dewey, that has its origins in Romanticism as a movement in European thought. The oddity of these origins having gone unremarked even by students of American philosophy will be part of my subject in the following pages, but I want to begin with the work of the one contemporary philosopher who has not only been conscious of the Romantic strain in American philosophy but who, increasingly and especially in his most recent work, has been led to identify himself with its tradition. This is Stanley Cavell, speaking in a recent paper on Emerson, for instance, of his work as a “philosophical journey” toward locating “an inheritance of Wittgenstein and Heidegger, and before them of Emerson and Thoreau, for all of whom there seems to be some question whether the individual or the community as yet, or any longer, exist.”
As such a remark may suggest, the origins of Cavell's own involvement with the Romantic tradition lie most clearly in his own early work on Wittgenstein and, in particular, on the problem of skepticism as it is isolated and attacked in Wittgenstein's writings. This is the significance of Cavell's insistence, heterodox enough at the time, on Wittgenstein as a confessional and therapeutic writer, like Augustine or Freud.
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- American Philosophy and the Romantic Tradition , pp. 1 - 33Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1991