The Claim of Reason Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality, and Tragedy

by Cavell, Stanley

• ISBN13: 9780195131079
• ISBN10: 019513107X
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1999-07-01
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

This handsome new edition of Stanley Cavell's landmark text, first published 20 years ago, provides a new preface that discusses the reception and influence of his work, which occupies a unique niche between philosophy and literary studies.

Author Biography

Stanley Cavell is Walter M. Cabot Professor of Aesthetics and the General Theory of Value at Harvard University, Emeritus.

Table of Contents

Foreword	p. xv
Wittgenstein and the Concept of Human Knowledge
Criteria and Judgment	p. 3
Criteria and Skepticism	p. 37
Austin and Examples	p. 49
What a Thing Is (Called)	p. 65
Natural and Conventional	p. 86
Normal and Natural	p. 111
Skepticism and the Existence of the World
The Quest of Traditional Epistemology: Opening	p. 129
The Reasonableness of Doubt	p. 130
The Appeal to Projective Imagination	p. 145
The Irrelevance of Projective Imagination as Directed Criticism	p. 154
A Further Problem	p. 159
Excursus on Wittgenstein's Vision of Language	p. 168
Learning a Word	p. 169
Projecting a Word	p. 180
The Quest of Traditional Epistemology: Closing	p. 191
The Philosopher's Ground for Doubt Requires Projection	p. 194
The Philosopher's Projection Poses a Dilemma	p. 199
The Philosopher's Basis; and a More Pervasive Conflict with His New Critics	p. 204
The Philosopher's Context Is Non-claim	p. 217
The Philosopher's Conclusion Is Not a Discovery	p. 221
Two Interpretations of Traditional Epistemology; Phenomenology	p. 225
The Knowledge of Existence	p. 231
Knowledge and the Concept of Morality
Knowledge and the Basis of Morality	p. 247
An Absence of Morality	p. 274
Rules and Reasons	p. 292
Promising and Punishing	p. 293
Play and the Moral Life	p. 303
The Autonomy of Morals	p. 313
Skepticism and the Problem of Others
Between Acknowledgment and Avoidance	p. 329
The parable of the boiling not	p. 332
The private language argument	p. 343
The allegory of words; interpretation; seeing something as something	p. 354
Seeing human beings as human beings	p. 370
Embryos	p. 373
Slaves	p. 375
Soul-blindness	p. 378
The human guise	p. 380
Knower and known	p. 382
My relations to myself	p. 384
Believing something and believing someone	p. 390
Believing myself	p. 393
Arguments from analogy and from design	p. 393
Frog body and frog soul	p. 395
Am I, or am I in, my body? Intactness and connection	p. 397
Statues and dolls	p. 401
Perfecting an automaton	p. 403
Feelings and "feelings"	p. 408
The ordonnance of the body; wonder vs. amazement	p. 411
The Polonius of the problem of others	p. 413
The Outsider	p. 416
The concept of horror; of the monstrous	p. 418
The (active) skeptical recital concerning other minds	p. 420
Empathic projection	p. 421
The seamlessness of projection	p. 424
The question of a "best case" for others	p. 429
Confinement and exposure in knowing	p. 432
Unrestricted acknowledgment; the Outcast	p. 435
Toward others we live our skepticism	p. 437
Suspicion of unrestricted owing as pathological, adolescent, or romantic	p. 440
The representative case for other minds is not defined by the generic	p. 442
The passive skeptical recital concerning other minds	p. 443
Skepticism and sanity again?	p. 447
Asymmetries between the two directions of skepticism	p. 451
Dr. Faust and Dr. Frankenstein	p. 456
Passiveness and activeness; the Friend and the Confessor	p. 459
The extraordinariness of the ordinary; romanticism	p. 463
Narcissism	p. 463
Proving the existence of the human	p. 465
The vanishing of the human	p. 468
The question of the history of the problem of others	p. 468
Distinctions of madness	p. 469
The other as replacement of God	p. 470
Blake and the sufficiency of finitude	p. 471
The science and the magic of the human	p. 473
Literature as the knowledge of the Outsider	p. 476
Bibliography	p. 497
Index of Names	p. 503
Index of Passages Cited from Philosophical Investigations	p. 507
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