Both Kuhn and Cavell acknowledge their indebtedness to each other in their respective books of the 60s. Cavell in (Must We Mean What We Say (1969)) and Kuhn in (The Structure of Scientific Revolutions 1962). They were together at Berkeley where they had both moved in 1956 as assistant professors after their first encounter at the Society of Fellows at Harvard (Kuhn 2000d, p. 197). In Berkeley, Cavell and Kuhn discovered a mutual understanding and an intellectual affinity. They had regular (...) conversations which Cavell describes as "extremely important" (Conant 1989, p. 40; cf. Cavell 1979, p. xix). Cavell says that he felt he wanted to assure Kuhn that "philosophy did not have standing answers to the questions [Kuhn] .. (shrink)

Louis Sass disputes that schizophrenia can be understood successfully according to the hitherto dominant models--for much of what schizophrenics say and do is neither regressive (as psychoanalysis claims) nor just faulty reasoning (as "cognitivists" claim). Sass argues instead that schizophrenics frequently exhibit hyper-rationality, much as philosophers do. He holds that schizophrenic language can after all be interpreted--if we hear it as Wittgenstein hears solipsistic language. I counter first that broadly Winchian considerations undermine both the hermeneutic conception of interpreting other humans (...) in general and Sass's hope of interpreting schizophrenics in particular. I then go on to argue that even if these Winchian considerations are not accepted, Sass in any case doesn't take sufficiently seriously Wittgenstein's use of nonsense as a term of criticism. Solipsism is not something we can understand so as to be able to understand analogically the schizophrenic's "world"--for there is no such thing as understanding it. Solipsism is nonsense, is nothing--there is no "world" there, in solipsists (as I show by reference to Cora Diamond's reading of Wittgenstein). Nor in any actually analogous cases of schizophrenia. Their "alienness" is the alienness of nothingness; roughly, of the fantasy of "logically alien thought". (shrink)

The purpose of this research is to show the relevance of the notion of 'skepticism' for the philosophy of art. From Modernism on, art is plagued by a lack of confidence in the traditional conventions and by an instability of the criteria governing the membership of an object to the category of 'art'. The notion of 'skepticism' is linked to the concept of 'expression': if art faces a form of skepticism, then the emphasis on the personal expression of artists and (...) audiences leads to a solution to the skeptical problem. The dissertation is divided into two parts: The first part, entitled 'Cavell, philosophy and skepticism', is a long Overture. With constant reference to the philosophies of Wittgenstein and Cavell, all the main themes of the dissertation are introduced: modernity and tradition, style and method, skepticism and ordinary, skepticism towards other minds (skepticism and expression). The second part, entitled 'Philosophy of Art and Modernism', isolates a line of thought from the writings of Tolstoy, Wittgenstein and Cavell. The three thinkers apply to art the concepts discussed in the previous part. Tolstoy, Wittgenstein and Cavell are linked by an awareness of a rupture in the relationship between contemporary art and tradition - a fracture that will be easy to recognize as skepticism in the art - and by the discovery of a similar solution. In particular, the notion of 'expression' will solve the skeptical problem. The first part is preparatory to the second because it contains all the themes and the concepts to be applied to art. The second part is analogue to the first: skepticism in the art, in fact, has a profound analogy with skepticism towards other minds. This analogy is made explicit in the conclusion, with a reference to attempts to define art. (shrink)