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16 results

  • 1 - Must We Mean What We Say? and Ordinary Language Philosophy

  • from Part I - Ordinary Language and Its Philosophy
  • Edited by Greg Chase, College of the Holy Cross, Massachusetts, Juliet Floyd, Boston University, Sandra Laugier
  • Book: Cavell's <i>Must We Mean What We Say?</i> at 50
  • Published online: 03 March 2022
  • Print publication: 10 March 2022, pp 15-33

  • Summary

    Must We Mean What We Say? is the first and only work in contemporary thought to carry the project of ordinary language philosophy through to its end. It thereby confronts and overcomes the harsh criticisms of ordinary language philosophy that began with Gellner’s attack in 1959, belying repeated claims that the tradition is “dead.” MWM shows that ordinary language philosophy is more than ever alive and relevant. Cavell’s emphasis on the “voice of the ordinary” responds to the risk of skepticism, that loss of or distancing from the world that film also explores (see The World Viewed). In Must We Mean What We Say?, Cavell offers us new ways to explore the relation between an individual speaker and her community, the possibility of revolution in philosophy, and the sense in which our relation to our own words figures our relations to ourselves: the question of self-knowledge and voice.

  • Introduction

  • Edited by Greg Chase, College of the Holy Cross, Massachusetts, Juliet Floyd, Boston University, Sandra Laugier
  • Book: Cavell's <i>Must We Mean What We Say?</i> at 50
  • Published online: 03 March 2022
  • Print publication: 10 March 2022, pp 1-12

  • Summary

    The revolutionary significance of Must We Mean What We Say?, Stanley Cavell’s first book and the best introduction to his thought, becomes increasingly evident fifty years after its publication, confronting us with newly relevant, transformative thinking about modernism, the idea of culture, ordinary language philosophy, the history of twentieth-century analytic philosophy, American philosophy, the 1960s, Wittgenstein, Rawls, Kant, Kierkegaard, Beckett, Shakespeare, and such eternal philosophical themes as truth, passion, utterance, self-knowledge, skepticism, and the value of criticism. Cavell’s intervention in ordinary language philosophy revolutionized its practice, overcoming its dogmas and challenging the analytic tradition from within, broadening its audiences. His focus on self-confrontation as central to philosophical practice, the shepherding of ordinary utterances into uses within forms of life, shows that the philosophical preconditions of democratic thinking lie in the embedding of meaning in everyday life, rooted in the ethical and aesthetic aspects of how we mean what we say.

Cavell's Must We Mean What We Say? at 50
  • Edited by Greg Chase, Juliet Floyd, Sandra Laugier
  • Published online: 03 March 2022
  • Print publication: 10 March 2022
  • In 1969 Stanley Cavell's Must We Mean What We Say? revolutionized philosophy of ordinary language, aesthetics, ethics, tragedy, literature, music, art criticism, and modernism. This volume of new essays offers a multi-faceted exploration of Cavell's first and most important book, fifty years after its publication. The key subjects which animate Cavell's book are explored in detail: ordinary language, aesthetics, modernism, skepticism, forms of life, philosophy and literature, tragedy and the self, the questions of voice and audience, jazz and sound, Wittgenstein, Austin, Beckett, Kierkegaard, Shakespeare. The essays make Cavell's complex style and sometimes difficult thought accessible to a new generation of students and scholars. They offer a way into Cavell's unique philosophical voice, conveying its seminal importance as an intellectual intervention in American thought and culture, and showing how its philosophical radicality remains of lasting significance for contemporary philosophy, American philosophy, literary studies, and cultural studies.

  • 2 - Aspects, Sense, and Perception

  • Edited by William Day, Le Moyne College, Syracuse, Victor J. Krebs
  • Book: Seeing Wittgenstein Anew
  • Published online: 05 June 2012
  • Print publication: 15 March 2010, pp 40-60

  • Summary

    Contemporary interpretations of phenomenology, as well as current theories of perception, define perception (and seeing) in terms of sense. This chapter brings out certain difficulties for the idea of perceptual sense, difficulties raised by Wittgenstein (and Austin). These difficulties come from the specific point of view of ordinary language philosophy. Talk of perceptual sense takes its start in Frege's notion of sense. This notion was the basis for the so-called Fregean readings of phenomenology. The criticisms in Austin's Sense and Sensibilia, though leveled directly at traditional empiricism, are perhaps even more useful today, now that a whole analysis of perception has been worked out in terms of sense. A phenomenon is not a symptom or a sign of something else that is real: on this point, Wittgenstein and Austin agree. Wittgenstein shows that the myth of seeing as an activity is bound up with a myth of seeing as passivity.