This article will highlight the distinctive role of Cavell in renewing a dawn of American philosophy. Following Emerson’s remark, ‘the inmost in due time becomes the outmost’, Cavell develops his distinctive line of antifoundationalist thought. To show how unique and valuable Cavell’s endeavor to resuscitate Emerson’s and Thoreau’s voice in American philosophy is, this paper discusses the political implications of Cavell’s Emersonian moral perfectionism. This involves a reconsideration of what measures justice and what justifies happiness. While Cavell is sometimes said (...) to be too personal and too subjective to be political, I shall argue that his Emersonian perfectionism, with its concomitant idea of the conversation of justice, is in fact thoroughly political and democratic. I shall illustrate this by examining his writing on a Hollywood film, Mr. Deeds Goes to Town. The film shows vividly that happiness is a condition for achieving democracy from within. In conclusion, I shall propose that a readiness for the risk inherent in speech, rather than, say, acquiescing in received ideas or hiding behind the words of others, is at the heart of perfectionist education for globally minded citizens. (shrink)

This article begins by clarifying the notion of what Stanley Cavell has called ‘Emersonian moral perfectionism.’ It goes on to explore this through close analysis of aspects of Emerson’s essay ‘Experience,’ in which ideas of trying or attempting or experimenting bring out the intimate relation between perfectionism and styles of writing. ‘Where do we find ourselves?’ Emerson asks, and the answer is to be found in part in what we write and what we say, injecting a new sense of possibility (...) and responsibility into our relation to our words. But the language we speak and the lives that go with it are at the same time burdened with a past, and in the case of English, and in the American context especially, it is marked with a kind of repression relating to questions of slavery and race. These matters are implicated in questions of constitution, in both general and specifically political senses. Hence, inheritance and appropriation become causes of critical sensitivity, as do the forms of praise and acknowledgment that should meet them. The article explores ways of thinking through Emerson’s relation to these aspects of experience and seeks to find responses pertinent to today. (shrink)

According to a captivating picture, epistemic justification is essentially a matter of epistemic or evidential likelihood. While certain problems for this view are well known, it is motivated by a very natural thought—if justification can fall short of epistemic certainty, then what else could it possibly be? In this paper I shall develop an alternative way of thinking about epistemic justification. On this conception, the difference between justification and likelihood turns out to be akin to the more widely recognised difference (...) between ceteris paribus laws and brute statistical generalisations. I go on to discuss, in light of this suggestion, issues such as classical and lottery-driven scepticism as well as the lottery and preface paradoxes. (shrink)

As a way of participating in the discussion on the disciplinary nature of philosophy of education, this article attempts to find another distinctive way of relating philosophy to education for the studies in philosophy of education. Recasting philosophical skepticism, which has been dismissed by Dewey and Rorty in their critiques of modern epistemology, it explores whether Cavell's romantic interpretation of it can allow us to conceive of skepticism as an exemplary practice of education, especially internal to the learner. This opens (...) up the possibility of viewing the disciplinary nature of philosophy of education as congenial to other humanities like literature or religious studies, rather than to social sciences as usually considered. (shrink)

Why should interpretation of conceptual schemes and practices across traditions work at all? In this paper we present the following necessary conditions of possibility for interpretation in comparative and Chinese philosophy: the interpreter must presuppose that there are mutually recognizable human practices; the interpreter must presuppose that “the other” is, on the whole, sincere, consistent, and right; the interpreter must be committed to certain epistemic virtues. Some of these necessary conditions are consistent with the fact that interpretation is not thwarted (...) by the “danger” of relativism or of incommensurability. Some other conditions are suggestive of reorientations of methodologies of comparative and Chinese philosophy. (shrink)

The ethics of care has contributed to modifying a dominant conception of ethics and changed the way we conceive vulnerability. It has introduced ethical stakes into politics, weakening, through its critique of theories of justice, the seemingly obvious link between an ethics of justice and political liberalism. However, care corresponds to a quite ordinary reality: the fact that people look after one another, take care of one another and thus are responsible. The aim of this paper is to connect the (...) ethics of care to the idea of the vulnerability of the human as it is developed in the moral philosophy inspired by Wittgenstein. (shrink)

The ways in which Wittgenstein was directly influenced by William James (by his early psychological work as well his later philosophy) have been thoroughly explored and charted by Russell B. Goodman. In particular, Goodman has drawn attention to the pragmatist resonances of the Wittgensteinian notion of hinge propositions as developedand articulated in the posthumously edited and published work, On Certainty. This paper attempts to extend Goodman’s observation, moving beyond his focus on James (specifically, James’s Pragmatism) as his pragmatist reference point. (...) It aims to articulate the affinity between Wittgenstein’s thought on the topic of certainty and that of the neglected pragmatist thinker, George Santayana. -/- The paper draws on Duncan Pritchard’s recent reading of Wittgenstein’s On Certainty in order to articulate the concept of certainty involved in the notion of hinge propositions. It identifies two important and related points of affinity between this Wittgensteinian line of thought on certainty and the line of thought on the same topic articulated in Santayana’s Scepticism and Animal Faith. The paper argues, firstly, that, both lines of thought reflect a pragmatist concept of certainty, according to which our most fundamental certainties are not conceived as purely theoretical objects of belief or knowledge but rather as thearational presuppositions of beliefs and practical action. Secondly, it examines the way inwhich the pragmatist concept of certainty functions, for the two thinkers as a response to scepticism. It argues that although the two thinkers’ responses are very different, they are mutually compatible and, together, point towards the possibility of a distinctively pragmatist response to scepticism, which involves an anti-epistemological model of the intimate relation of the human self to the world. (shrink)

The Linda paradox is a key topic in current debates on the rationality of human reasoning and its limitations. We present a novel analysis of this paradox, based on the notion of verisimilitude as studied in the philosophy of science. The comparison with an alternative analysis based on probabilistic confirmation suggests how to overcome some problems of our account by introducing an adequately defined notion of verisimilitudinarian confirmation.

In the “Lecture on ethics”, Wittgenstein declares that ethical statements are essentially nonsense. He later told Friedrich Waismann that it is essential to “speak for oneself” on ethical matters. These comments might be taken to suggest that Wittgenstein shared an emotivist view of ethics—that one can only speak for oneself because there is no truth in ethics, only expressions of opinion (or emotions). I argue that this assimilation of Wittgenstein to emotivist thought is deeply misguided, and rests upon a serious (...) misunderstanding of what is implied by the nonsensicality of ethical claims on Wittgenstein's view. I develop a reading of Wittgenstein's remarks in the “Lecture on ethics” on which ethical statements, despite their nonsensicality, reveal the perspective of the speaker. The purpose of ethical language is to elucidate a speaker's perspective. Such elucidations, and the perspectives they reveal, can be evaluated, criticized, and respected on principled grounds even if, as Wittgenstein insists, no ethical judgment can be (objectively) justified by any fact. I contrast Wittgenstein's comments on ethics with some comments made by Frank Ramsey (from the same period), which appear similar to Wittgenstein's remarks on value. Contra Ramsey's insistence that there is “nothing to discuss” about (or within) ethics, a proper understanding of Wittgenstein's views does not commit us to passing over ethics in silence. (shrink)

Why is mutual understanding between two substantially different comprehensive language communities often problematic and even unattainable? To answer this question, the author first introduces a notion of presuppositional languages. Based on the semantic structure of a presuppositional language, the author identifies a significant condition necessary for effective understanding of a language: the interpreter is able to effectively understand a language only if he/she is able to recognize and comprehend its metaphysical presuppositions. The essential role of the knowledge of metaphysical presuppositions (...) in understanding is further strengthened by developing a truth-value conditional theory of understanding. It is concluded that if the interpreter approaches an incompatible alien language from the standpoint of the interpreter's own language by projecting the metaphysical presuppositions of his/her own language upon the alien language, then the mutual understanding between the two language communities is doomed to failure. (shrink)

This paper explores Stanley Cavell’s notion of ‘passionate utterance’, which acts as an extension of/departure from (we might read it as both) J. L. Austin’s theory of the performative. Cavell argues that Austin having made the revolutionary discovery that truth claims in language are bound up with how words perform, then gets bogged by convention when discussing what is done ‘by’ words. In failing to account for the less predictable, unconventional aspects of language, the latter therefore washes his hands of (...) the expressive passionate aspects of speech. To ignore such aspects is to ignore an important moral dimension of language. Finally, I bring Cavell’s approach to bear on the epistemic criterion, which Michael Hand applies in his paper ‘Should We Teach Homosexuality as a Controversial Issue?’. I suggest that Hand’s approach, by failing to account for the linguistic dimension of truth and the expressive quality that accompanies this dimension, presents an overly narrow conception of moral education. (shrink)

In this article I want to explore some questions that arise from the work of Stanley Cavell. My purpose is to examine lines of connections between Cavell's readings of Wittgenstein (specifically his notions of 'criteria', 'aspect blindness' and 'primitive reaction', with special reference to the philosophical problem of 'other minds') and Shakespeare, on the one side, and a certain dimension of the ethical, on the other. Although Cavell has rarely offered explicit remarks on the issue of morality, and is normally (...) not considered a moral philosopher, it is my contention that it is possible to elicit what we could call an implied ethics from his philosophical view. This ethical outlook is not to be confused with a theory, but is rather a turn or bent that emerges especially by understanding the place of acknowledgment and ethical responsiveness in our practical life. Key Words: acknowledgment • Cavell • ethics • skepticism • Wittgenstein. (shrink)

This essay builds from an analysis of the philosophical underpinnings of Bruce Lee’s jeet kune do to an analysis of the current state of academic scholarship generally and martial arts studies scholarship specifically. For the sake of a more comprehensive understanding of the philosophical underpinnings of jeet kune do, and in particular its affinities with a philosophical tradition traced by Stanley Cavell under the heading of perfectionism, this essay brings the philosophical writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Ayn Rand into (...) contact with Lee’s writings during the time that he spent formulating his martial arts philosophy. Additionally, this essay uses the philosophical insights of Emerson, Rand, and Lee to challenge longstanding academic dogma vis-à-vis poststructuralist philosophy, the methods of academic intervention, and the nature of philosophical argumentation. Though pitched as a debate regarding the content and the status of Bruce Lee and his combative philosophy, this essay endeavors to inspire scholars to (re)examine their conceptions of Bruce Lee, martial arts, and martial arts studies. (shrink)

Up to the introduction of the term and concept of incommensurability by T. S. Kuhn and P. K. Feyerabend in the early 1960s, scientific texts were supposed to pose no problem as regards their translation, unlike literature, which was thought very difficult to translate. After the introduction of the term, translation of scientific language became equally problematic because, due to conceptual and perceptual incommensurability, there was no common observation basis to ground linguistic equivalences between languages of incommensurable paradigms. This article (...) highlights the presuppositions that link incommensurability to dramatic consequences (impossibility of communication, translation, and comparative evaluation of paradigms) and tries to sketch an alternative way of understanding incommensurability and translation drawing on Kuhn’s work. From this perspective, translation is not an all-or-nothing affair for either science or literature and becomes a problem to be solved for each particular set of circumstances. (shrink)

This paper aims to show how Emerson provides a reworking of Kantian understandings of moral education in young children’s Bildung. The article begins and ends by thinking of Emersonian self-cultivation as a form of improvisatory or wild Bildung. It explores the role of Bildung and self-cultivation in preschools through a philosophy that accounts for children’s ‘Wild wisdom’ by letting Emerson speak to Kant. The paper argues that Kant’s vision of Bildung essentially involves reason’s turn upon itself and that Emerson, particularly (...) in how he is taken up by Cavell, shows that such a turn is already present in the processes of children inheriting, learning, and improvising with language. This improvisatory outlook on moral education is contrasted with common goals of moral education prescribed in early childhood education where the Swedish Curriculum for the Preschool Lpfö 98 is used as an example. (shrink)

Gordon Baker in his last decade published a series of papers (now collected inBaker 2004), which are revolutionary in their proposals for understanding of later Wittgenstein. Taking our lead from the first of those papers, on “perspicuous presentations,” we offer new criticisms of ‘elucidatory’ readers of later Wittgenstein, such as Peter Hacker: we argue that their readings fail to connect with the radically therapeutic intent of the ‘perspicuous presentation’ concept, as an achievement‐term, rather than a kind of ‘objective’ mapping of (...) a ‘conceptual landscape.’Baker's Wittgenstein, far from being a ‘language policeman’ of the kind that often fails to influence mainstream philosophy, offers an alternative to the latent scientism of Wittgenstein's influential ‘elucidatory’ readers. (shrink)

This paper addresses both ‘student engagement’ in contemporary universities, and student ‘disengagement’ – where the latter is often seen as a failure of performance, or absence of will. In a bold move, the paper asks whether students should be engaged in their university education, and whether there is value in forms of disengagement. It finds an original way in which student disengagement can be understood by drawing on the writings of Stanley Cavell – on the philosophical appeal to what we (...) say, our search for criteria, and on ideas of acknowledgement and avoidance in his work on Shakespearian tragedy. It shows what is at stake in our attunement with, and dissent from, criteria, and how such dissent can be educative. The paper considers the film ‘Stella Dallas’, in which Stella’s aversion to, her disengagement from, her culture’s criteria, is not a passive withdrawal, but rather the finding of voice, her education as a grownup. The paper concludes that disengagement, understood as aversion, dissent and refusal of voice, is not to be seen always as a lack of action or of care, but as the opposite: the active voicing of what we will, or will not, consent to in our education. (shrink)

This paper responds to an essay by Dirk-Martin Grube published in this same journal issue. Special attention is drawn to issues such as tolerance, respect, and the recognition of otherness regarding religious beliefs. Grube interestingly suggests that the focus on religious truth should be replaced by a focus on justification. Some critical remarks on these suggestions are made.

In ‘Aesthetics Problems of Modern Philosophy’ Stanley Cavell proposes, first, that Kant's characterization of judgments of beauty may be read as a Wittgensteinian grammatical characterization, and, second, that the philosophical appeal to ‘what we say and mean’ partakes of the grammar of judgment of beauty. I argue first that the expression of the dawning of an aspect partakes of the grammar of judgments of beauty as characterized by Kant, and may also be seen—on a prevailing way of thinking about concepts (...) and how they relate to their instances—to have the same kind of significance that judgments of beauty have according to Kant. And then I argue that there are good reasons for being suspicious of the prevailing conception of concepts, and therefore good reasons for being suspicious of the proposed understanding of the significance of aspect perception—an understanding that has attracted many readers of Wittgenstein's remarks on aspects. This leads me to suggest that it is actually the philosophical appeal to ordinary language that has the kind of significance that the Kantian picture attributes to judgments of beauty and to the seeing of aspects. In this way, I offer a way to vindicate Cavell's second proposal. (shrink)

This paper offers a reading of The Awful Truth in order to meditate further on Stanley Cavell's articulation of the themes of the ordinary and perfectionist marriage as exemplified in the genre of films he calls the Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage in Cavell and . I explore different ways in which this film and the medium of film generally are capable of making the unseen visible: revealing the ordinary that is hidden behind its very familiarity; making available an awareness that (...) we are unseen by the projected reality of film; and, in this film in particular, showing that this divorcing couple - whose marriage and sexual life are essentially off-screen - are as if married all along even while they pursue other love interests. (shrink)

This article deals critically with the process of coming to terms with ‘genocide’. It starts from the observation that conventional philosophical and legal approaches to capturing the essence of ‘genocide’ through an improved definition necessarily fail to adapt to the ever-changing nature of political violence. Faced with this challenge, the article suggests that the contemporary debate on genocide (and its denial) should be complemented with a focus on transforming the perceptive and interpretive frameworks through which acts of violence are discussed (...) in the public sphere. The main purpose of this article is to contribute, from the vantage point of political theory, to this debate by offering a novel normative perspective on negative reactions to genocide. Hence I argue that it is productive to speak of ‘genocide blindness’ in cases when the members of the public sphere are simply incapable of seeing an instance of violence as genocidal. To establish this claim, the article introduces Ludwig Wittgenstein’s reflections on ‘aspect-seeing’ so as to underline the importance of changing the way that political violence is perceived and interpreted. In a second step, the article turns to María Pía Lara’s theory of storytelling as a concrete mechanism for triggering and instituting this kind of change. (shrink)

I discuss the way in which the cleavage between the Continental and the Anglo-American philosophies originated, the images of both philosophical worlds, the converging rediscoveries from the Seventies, as well as recent ecumenical or anti-ecumenical strategies. I argue that pragmatism provides an important counterinstance to both the familiar self-images and to fashionable ecumenical or anti-ecumenical strategies. My conclusions are: Continental philosophy does not exist; less obviously, also analytic philosophy does not exist, or does not exist any longer as a current (...) or a paradigm; what does exist is, on the one hand, philosophy of language and, on the other, philosophy of mind, that is, two disciplines; the dissolution of analytic philosophy as a school has been extremely fruitful, precisely in so far as it has left room for disciplines and research programmes; what is left, of the Anglo-American/Continental cleavage is primarily differences in styles, depending partly on intellectual traditions, partly owing to sociology, history, institutional frameworks; these differences should not be blurred by rash ecumenical; besides, theoretical differences are alive as ever, but within both camps; finally, there is indeed a lag in the appropriation of intellectual techniques by most schools of ‘Continental’ philosophy, and this should be overcome through appropriation of what the best ‘analytic’ philosophers have produced. (shrink)

Conceptions of teaching quality and teacher accountability, and the values and assumptions that underpin them, are relatively under-examined by policy makers. We suggest ways in which philosophers might address this deficit, with reference to policy concerns found in the United Kingdom (UK). Further philosophical questions are generated by this process of reflection and we offer a partial analysis of those we judge to be of particular significance. While optimistic generally, we identify three challenges to asserting a role for philosophical analysis (...) in policy, practice and research concerned with teacher education, and urge philosophers of education to engage in constructive dialogue with other critical and reflective thinkers in the field of education. (shrink)

In this article, I attempt to bring some colour to a discussion of fraught topics in education. Though the scenes and stories (from education and elsewhere) that feature here deal with racism, the discussion aims to say something to such topics more generally. The philosophers whose work I draw on here are Stanley Cavell and Judith Butler. Both Butler and Cavell develop (or depart from) J.L. Austin's theory of the performative utterance. Butler, following Derrida, argues that in concentrating on the (...) illocutionary force of utterances (their capacity to do things), Austin fails to account for the force of words themselves. The iterability of language means that words are never at one with themselves. They carry their old contexts with them as they enter into new ones. This has important consequences for ethical issues that pertain to what Butler calls the ?performativity? of gender and race. Though we are performed by language, this performance has a dynamic quality that leads to the reshaping of identity. In contrast, for Cavell, the disappointing aspect of Austin's thought relates to the latter's neglect of the perlocutionary effect of language ? what is done ?by words?. By taking on this project, Cavell embraces the unconventional aspects of language characterised by ?passionate? expression and exchange. Butler and Cavell approach the performative utterance from different directions. In the last part of this article, the significance of this difference is discussed in relation to the provision of a moral education with regard to tackling issues surrounding racism. (shrink)

In his essay 'The Scandal of Skepticism', Stanley Cavell discusses aspects of the work of Emmanuel Levinas with a view to understanding how 'philosophical and religious ambitions so apparently different' as his own and those of Levinas can have led to 'phenomenological coincidences so precise'. The present paper explores themes of scepticism and alterity as these emerge in the work of these two increasingly influential philosophers. It shows education to be a sustained preoccupation in their work, crucially related to these (...) guiding themes. In the process it seeks to dispel certain assumptions regarding poststructuralism, on the one hand, and the religious implications of Levinas's thought, on the other. This lays the way for an account of the criticality of human being, of the significance of this for community, and of the demands this makes on education. (shrink)

This paper is the sequel to Part 1, which appeared in this Journal, Vol. 46 No. 2, 2012. Following Cavell and his insistence that we should not try to escape from the existential conditions we find ourselves in and look for false certainties, the relevance of embracing a particular stance is elaborated. A commitment to giving substance to an ideal of ‘the good life’ is neither an injustice towards the other nor an ignorance of her freedom. On the contrary, here (...) responsibility is accepted and at the same time it is acknowledged that we always have only the particular points of departure that we contingently start from. Coming to terms with this kind of dependency constitutes living out the scepticism that is implied by our being human: the logic of this is given along with our human condition. (shrink)

Paul Standish; Knowledge, Practice, Truth Beyond Liberal Education: essays in honour of Paul H. Hirst, Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 28, Issue 2, 3.

This essay discusses Wittgenstein’s suggestion that we may speak of a distinction between a word’s primary and secondary senses. Instead of seeing the distinction merely as an example of a puzzling language use, many commentators have attempted to work out the distinction in terms of a supplement to a general theory of sense that they presume Wittgenstein developed in his later writings. I don’t think it is fair to ascribe such systematic aspirations to Wittgenstein.Indeed, Wittgenstein speaks explicitly of the distinction (...) only at two junctures in his work; this suggests that the distinction in itself was not of great import to Wittgenstein. In my view, it is essential to see how the example resonates with other ideas and problems in his writings, for example, his discussions of rule-following in part one of the Investigations. By my lights, this has not been fully recognized in the standard literature. In discussing the distinction, I will argue for the importance of paying attention to a broader context than what is normally considered. (shrink)

In this paper I investigate how philosophy can speak for children and how children can have a voice in philosophy and speak for philosophy. I argue that we should understand children as responsible rational individuals who are involved in their own philosophical inquiries and who can be involved in our own philosophical investigations—not because of their rational abilities, but because we acknowledge them as conversational partners, acknowledge their reasons as reasons, and speak for them as well as let them speak (...) for us and our rational community. In order to argue this I turn, first, to Gareth Matthews' philosophy of childhood and suggest a reconstruction of some of his concepts in line with the philosophy of Stanley Cavell. Second, in order to examine more closely our conceptions of rationality and our pictures of children, I consider the children's books, The Lorax and Where is My Sister? and Henrik Ibsen's play, The Wild Duck. (shrink)

This paper investigates Wittgenstein's remarks on happiness and harmony in the context of Wittgensteinian antitheodicy. Philosophers of religion inspired by Wittgenstein's philosophy often criticize theodicies seeking to justify apparently meaningless evil and suffering within God's overall harmonious plan. The paper analyses Wittgenstein's early views on happiness as harmony with the world, examining whether they are incompatible with an antitheodicist approach abandoning the very project of theodicy by acknowledging a certain kind of disharmony. However, antitheodicy may also, at the transcendental meta-level, (...) be considered a “harmonious” way of “seeing the world aright,” which raises a reflexive problem for any Wittgenstein-inspired antitheodicy. (shrink)

The role of criteria in Wittgenstein’s philosophy The main objective of this article is to explain the role of the concept of a ‘criterion’ in Ludwig Wittgenstein’s philosophy. To do so, the author juxtaposes a few well‑known interpretations of this issue, and compares the notion of a criterion with the notion of a rule. Contrary to Peter M.S. Hacker’s reading, he points out that according to Wittgenstein, to give the ‘criteria of use’ of an expression is to determine its ‘grammar’. (...) To meet the criteria does not merely mean justifying the fact that a given thing occurs, but means that a given expression has an application under the particular conditions. Thus, there is no difference between the determination of the criteria of an expression’s use and the explication of its meaning. It should be noted that the fact that the expression ‘x’ has an application in a given situation does not always imply that the sentence ‘this is x’ is also true in this situation. The Wittgensteinian notion of a criterion is a semantical rather than an epistemological concept. Therefore, the conceived criteria cannot be used to reject scepticism, if by rejecting it we mean demonstrating its falsity. According to Wittgenstein, we can show at most that a sceptic, who rejects all criteria of use of words, cannot frame any doubts. (shrink)

It is not uncommon to hear parents say in discussions they have with their children 'Look at it this way'. And called upon for their advice, counsellors too say something to adults with the significance of 'Try to see it like this'. The change of someone's perspective in the context of child rearing is the focus of this paper. Our interest in this lies not so much in giving an answer to the practical problems that are at stake, but at (...) disentangling the issues on a conceptual level. Within the so-called second part of his Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein deals with shared practices and with concepts such as 'seeing' and 'seeing as'. What he says there is in terms of content linked with his earlier Tractatus position concerning ethics, a matter which will first be dealt with. After that, the relevant sections of his later work are discussed. Following Cavell, it is concluded that to try to get someone to see what one sees, necessarily presupposes giving it out of one's hands. The passivity this points at highlights what Erziehung in the end comes down to. (shrink)

We believe we owe one another respect. We believe we ought to pay what we owe by treating one another ‘with respect.’ If we could understand these beliefs we would be well on the way to understanding morality itself. If we could justify these beliefs we could vindicate a central part of our moral experience.Respect comes in many varieties. We respect some people for their upright character, others for their exceptional achievements. There are people we respect as forces of nature: (...) we go to great lengths to accommodate their moods, wiles, and demands. Finally, most of us seem to respect people simply because they are people. This is the sort of respect of special interest to moral theory.In order to be worthy of this last sort of respect, it is not only sufficient but necessary that one be a person. We can, of course, take a similar attitude towardnonpersons. (shrink)

We offer an overview of what we take to be the main themes in Annalisa Coliva’s book, Moore and Wittgenstein: Scepticism, Certainty and Common Sense. In particular, we focus on the ‘framework reading’ that she offers of Wittgenstein’s On Certainty and its anti-sceptical implications. While broadly agreeing with the proposal that Coliva puts forward on this score, we do suggest one important supplementation to the view—viz., that this way of dealing with radical scepticism needs to be augmented with an account (...) of the meta-sceptical problem which this proposal generates, which we call epistemic vertigo. (shrink)

Beyond a monolingual mentality and beyond the language that is typically observed in the prevalent discourse of education for understanding other cultures, this article tries to present another approach: Stanley Cavell's idea of philosophy as translation . This Cavellian approach shows that understanding foreign cultures involves a relation to other cultures already within one's native culture. Foreshadowing the Cavellian sense of tragedy, Emerson's 'Devil's child' helps us detect the sources of repression and blindness that are hidden behind the foundationalist approach (...) to other cultures. The child represents the human condition in which the self and language are simultaneously in the process of translation. On the strength of this I propose a possibility of understanding other cultures that is crucially related to language education, one that can point us beyond monolingualism . Cavell's view of language and the self envisions a way of releasing, not repressing, the desire to express one's inner light as a crucial source of the revival of one's native culture from within, while at the same time cultivating an eye for the other, the stranger, who is already here within oneself. This is to find alterity in the human condition in terms of the translation that is inherent to language and the immigrancy of the self. (shrink)

‘Particularism’ is a meta-ethical theory resulting from a holistic doctrine in the theory of reasons. According to Jonathan Dancy, the foremost contemporary proponent of particularism, ‘a feature that is a reason in favour of an action in one case may be no reason at all in another, or even a reason against’ (2004: 190). From this, Dancy claims, it follows that the ‘possibility of moral thought and judgement does not depend on the provision of a suitable supply of moral principles’ (...) (2004: 7). This doctrine is of significant interest and import in its own right, and accordingly is the subject of considerable critical attention. The concern of this paper, however, is not meta-ethics but semantics. (shrink)

Participants on both sides of the contemporary debate between reductionism and anti-reductionism about testimony commonly describe testimonial knowledge as knowledge acquired at second hand. I argue that fully appreciating the distinctive sense in which testimonial knowledge is secondhand supports anti-reductionism over reductionism but also that it supports a particular kind of anti-reductionism very different from that typically offered in the literature. Testimonial knowledge is secondhand in the demanding sense of being justified by the authority of a speaker where this requires (...) that epistemic responsibility for meeting challenges to the audience's testimonial knowledge is shared between speaker and audience. The epistemic credentials of testimonial knowledge are in this sense importantly interpersonal. (shrink)

Harry Collins' central argument about experimental practice revolves around the thesis that facts can only be generated by good instruments but good instruments can only be recognized as such if they produce facts. This is what Collins calls the experimenters' regress. For Collins, scientific controversies cannot be closed by the ‘facts’ themselves because there are no formal criteria independent of the outcome of the experiment that scientists can apply to decide whether an experimental apparatus works properly or not.No one seems (...) to have noticed that the debate is in fact a rehearsal of the ancient philosophical debate about skepticism. The present article suggests that the way out of radical skepticism offered by the so-called mitigated skeptics is a solution to the problem of consensus formation in science.Keywords: Argumentation; Skepticism; Sociology of science; Philosophy of science; Scientific controversies. (shrink)

There is a widespread assumption that ordinary language philosophy was killed off sometime in the 1960s or 70s by a combination of Gricean pragmatics and the rapid development of systematic semantic theory. Contrary to that widespread assumption, however, contemporary versions of ordinary language philosophy are alive and flourishing, but going by various aliases—in particular (some versions of) "contextualism" and (some versions of) "experimental philosophy". And a growing group of contemporary philosophers are explicitly embracing the methods as well as the title (...) of ordinary language philosophy and arguing that it has been unfairly maligned and was never decisively refuted. In this overview, I will outline the main projects and arguments employed by contemporary ordinary language philosophers, and make the case that updated versions of the arguments made by ordinary language philosophers in the middle of the twentieth century are attracting renewed attention. (shrink)

Consider the following proposition: It is possible that all of our perceptual experiences are ‘delusive.’ According to Gilbert Ryle, is demonstrably absurd. In this paper I address four questions: What is Ryle’s argument against?; How persuasive is it?; What positions are ruled out if is absurd?; and How does Ryle’s position compare with contemporary work on skepticism?

(1993). Wittgenstein, Davidson, and the Myth of Incommensurability. Canadian Journal of Philosophy: Vol. 23, Supplementary Volume 19: New Essays on Metaphilosophy, pp. 181-221.

Ostensibly, Wittgenstein’s last remarks published in 1969 under the title On Certainty are about epistemology, more precisely about the problem of scepticism. This is the standard interpretation of On Certainty. But I contend, in this paper, that we will get closer to Wittgenstein’s intentions and perhaps find new and illuminating ways to interpret his late contribution if we keep in mind that his primary goal was not to provide an answer to scepticism. In fact, I think that the standard reading (...) leads to a distorted view of Wittgenstein’s contribution in On Certainty. In order to see that, scepticism will first be briefly characterised, and then I will attempt to circumscribe more precisely the standard reading of On Certainty. In section 4, three exegetical arguments against the standard reading are offered – the hope being that the weight of these three arguments, taken together, instils doubt in the reader’s mind about the correctness of the standard reading. The paper concludes with an attempt to gesture at the philosophical significance of On Certainty once we set aside the standard reading. (shrink)

What if education were not about becoming something, making something of yourself, becoming some thing? What if we were to consider education as becoming-world? These questions are posed against the background of the current populist nationalist backlash against the consequences of globalization, along with growing anti-intellectualism and anti-democratic sentiment. How can education contribute locally and globally to fostering and safeguarding the very possibility of democratic practices against the neoliberal consecration of reified social relations? Becoming Things, Becoming-world contributes to contemporary discussions (...) in philosophy of education by developing a vision of a critical educational cosmopolitanism founded upon a renewed critique of reification. While cosmopolitan education has often been articulated in terms of an ethical and political response to globalization, this thesis proposes a different outlook. I argue that the idea of cosmopolitan education predates the onset of what we now term globalization, and that it provides a meaningful conception of education beyond the present socio-political condition. Moreover, I propose to rethink cosmopolitan education as a critique of reification, i.e. a critique of social relations taking on the character of mere things. The critique of reification helps to foreground aspects that have previously been neglected and marginalized in educational cosmopolitanism, such as its economic-material dimensions. At the same time, a critical cosmopolitan perspective is needed for a timely de-centering of critical social theory. Re-assessing the Cynic tradition and drawing on critical theorists such as Gerard Delanty and Axel Honneth as well as on New Wittgensteinian philosophers as Alice Crary, I advance a post-universalist understanding of cosmopolitanism. This is based on dynamic social relations and a broad understanding of rationality which includes imaginary aspects as well as the education of our sensitivities. Cosmopolitanism is understood as a lived practice which critically challenges reified social and cultural relations, including the strictures of particular socio-economic structures. The notion of reification is distinguished from other forms of alienation, objectification and instrumentalization and is deployed to characterize lasting distortions of our relations to each other, to the world and to ourselves. Against any idealizing take on communicative practice, I show that language, knowledge, and education do not necessarily counter-act reifying tendencies. Indeed, they themselves can become sources for enhancing processes of reification. A fresh look at the critique of reification allows us adequately to describe and understand the interrelation between contemporary capitalism, the forms of subjectivity it produces and the possibilities of democratic education and education towards democracy. Such an understanding is needed in face of the apparent impossibility of imagining a society, and envisioning an education, beyond the conditions formulated by contemporary neoliberal policies. Education as becoming-world maintains a hopeful outlook on the possibilities of our globalizing and pluralizing social reality as well as a keen focus on the tensions and challenges that this poses for contemporary educational endeavors on individual as well as structural levels. (shrink)

I argue in this paper for the rich and subtle connections between moral philosophy and literature as they are articulated and explored in the work of the contemporary American philosopher, Cora Diamond. In its significance for broader educational debates—specifically, debates regarding the value of the arts and humanities in a context of global economic collapse—Diamond's work is strikingly original. I argue that it offers much more to educators than the related work of her Anglo-American contemporaries, among them Martha Nussbaum and (...) Richard Rorty. In development of my position, I read Diamond's 2008 essay, The Difficulty of Reality and the Difficulty of Philosophy, withA Girl is a Half-formed Thing, the debut novel of Irish writer Eimear McBride. (shrink)