Word: wittgensteins
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...surprising that most council members found the meetings boring. They got tired of hearing the same representatives ask the same questions of different proposals, meeting after meeting. To save themselves from the tedium, at least two representatives studied foreign language flash-cards, while another worked his way through Wittgenstein. Others found equally productive ways to pass the time...
Cavell's concern with philosophy's mode of presentation--just one of the points where he departs from (or perhaps collides with) the prevailing attitude of professional American philosophy--is the source of much that is rich and illuminating in his readings of Nietzsche, Heidegger and especially Emerson and Wittgenstein, which he undertakes in these three lectures...
...second lecture, a careful reading of Saul Kripke's account of the Wittgensteinian "solution" to the problem of skepticism, appears at first to bear little relation to the first lecture. Here Cavell is intent on untangling Kripke's seductive interpretation of Wittgenstein's passages on rule-following. Kripke, Cavell suggests, misconstrues Wittgenstein's sense of the skeptical in his very supposition that there is a problem to be solved...
Cavell's treatment of the Kripke reading reflects his longtime concern with establishing the "seriousness of Wittgenstein's investment in the ordinary." According to Cavell, Wittgenstein shares with Emerson an attitude toward thinking characterized by an "entrustment of ordinary words." This attitude, if I understand it, is also the condition for the "Conversation of Justice"--the conversation whereby a democratic society comes to know and to criticize itself from within...
Although Cavell's Moral Reasoning course draws on much of the material found in the book, Conditions is not an introduction to philosophy. It presupposes considerable familiarity with Emerson, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein and Rawls. But the book does serve as an introduction to Cavell's thought, to his stunning literary interpretations, his mind-bending prose and his commitment to the future of American philosophy. As Cavell himself notes, the lectures are open-ended--their achievement, in part, lies in the relations they establish and the foundations they lay. And so, while not as satisfying as some of Cavell's other work...