Philosophy’s response to skepticism Stanley Cavell and the inheritance of Ludwig Wittgenstein

Leodolter, Anton (2024) Philosophy’s response to skepticism Stanley Cavell and the inheritance of Ludwig Wittgenstein. Doctoral thesis, University of East Anglia.

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Abstract

This dissertation presents an original interpretation of the critical philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein and Stanley Cavell. It is well known that Wittgenstein interprets philosophical puzzles posed by the metaphysical tradition dramatically and psychologically as a kind of illness, rendering the philosophical response to metaphysics a matter of acquiring intellectually sanity. Cavell’s interpretation of Wittgenstein goes beyond the traditional understanding by viewing the return from metaphysics not just as a path to personal sanity and intellectual clarity. Instead of focusing only on individuals or specific fields like philosophy, Cavell sees it as a necessary response to the cultural and historical tendency to repudiate the ordinary. Insofar as Cavell interprets this drive not only as pertaining to the individual but as permeating public history of the modern period (since Descartes and Shakespeare), the response to skepticism (the repudiation of the ordinary), hence philosophy, epitomized by the “Wittgensteinian voice”, presents itself as a critique of modernity. While such a reading of Cavell’s work is readily available, mostly notably in his mid-period book Disowning Knowledge, in his magnum opus The Claim of Reason and his late text This New Yet Unapproachable America, going back to Wittgenstein with Cavell, and reading Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations as exemplifying a critique of modernity presents the real challenge of this dissertation. Cavell, I argue, permits us to interpret Wittgenstein’s psychological dramatization of metaphysics as depicting a catastrophic eventuality for a culture, of public history and presence.
Besides attempting to place Wittgenstein and Cavell in a broader thematic context of modernity and culture, this dissertation’s second thread concerns their mode of response to skepticism, which, as I suggest, is best conceived in terms of interpretations and critical responses to text, as opposed to solutions of what has been traditionally associated with Wittgenstein, namely canonical problems of philosophy. For Cavell and Wittgenstein a text can be read and interpreted as exemplifying and instantiating the repudiation of the human.

Item Type:	Thesis (Doctoral)
Faculty \ School:	Faculty of Arts and Humanities > School of Politics, Philosophy, Language and Communication Studies (former - to 2024)
Depositing User:	Nicola Veasy
Date Deposited:	06 Mar 2025 15:04
Last Modified:	06 Mar 2025 15:04
URI:	https://ueaeprints.uea.ac.uk/id/eprint/98708
DOI:

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