Doubt, our modern Crown of Thorns

2016 ◽  
Vol 52 ◽  
pp. 437-455
Author(s):  
Charles M. Stang
Keyword(s):  
Chronic Illness ◽  
Modern Philosophy ◽  
Ludwig Wittgenstein ◽  
Stanley Cavell ◽  
As If

This essay uses T. E. Lawrence's characterization of doubt as ‘our modern crown of thorns’, as an entrée into thinking through the coincidence of doubt and faith in the four canonical gospels. However much each of the gospels may wish to induce faith, it leaves its readers with the distinct impression that doubt, understood differently in each, cannot be fully dispelled. The gospels thereby testify to a lively, ancient appreciation for the irrepressibility of doubt. This essay then turns to the problem of scepticism in modern philosophy. In his work on Ludwig Wittgenstein, the American philosopher Stanley Cavell suggests that scepticism is a ‘condition’ of knowledge, both in the sense of something from which we suffer as if from a chronic illness, and in the sense of that which makes knowledge possible at all. The reader is invited to think of the dialectics of doubt and faith in a similar way, of doubt as the very condition of faith.

Revolutions of the Ordinary: Victorian Studies and the Turn to Ordinary Language

2019 ◽  
Vol 47 (2) ◽  
pp. 449-461 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Wright
Keyword(s):  
Ludwig Wittgenstein ◽  
Ordinary Language ◽  
Literary Studies ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Intellectual Life ◽  
Ordinary Language Philosophy ◽  
Language Philosophy ◽  
Stanley Cavell ◽  
Victorian Studies ◽  
As If

“To engage seriously with ordinary language philosophy,” Toril Moi tells us in the introduction to Revolution of the Ordinary: Literary Studies after Wittgenstein, Austin, and Cavell, “is a little like undergoing psychoanalysis. Wittgenstein assumes that we don't begin doing philosophy just for the sake of it, but because something is making us feel confused, as if we had lost our way.” As Moi begins her project of explaining to an audience of literary critics the insights of ordinary-language philosophy, represented primarily by the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein, J. L. Austin, and Stanley Cavell, and making a case for the value of their ideas for the practice we usually call close reading, this psychoanalytic metaphor makes a sudden turn to diagnosis, or to the initiation of a kind of therapeutic address that can feel coercive even in its charisma. You must recognize your sickness, Moi insists, before you can be receptive to the treatment. “Who wants to undergo philosophical therapy,” she goes on to ask, “if they feel that everything in their intellectual life is just fine as it is? Paradoxically, then, the best readers of the reputedly ‘conservative’ Wittgenstein might be those who genuinely feel the need for a change” (12). What kind of therapeutic project does Moi want to pursue in this book, which begins by distinguishing the best readers (the readiest patients) from those who think, conservatively, that everything is “just fine as it is”?

Aristotelianism in the 17th century

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Roger Ariew
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Modern Philosophy ◽  
17Th Century

Aristotelians in the seventeenth century comprised a group of mostly anonymous textbook writers whose chief claim to fame is that their philosophy was opposed by such early moderns as Descartes and Galileo. In line with the characterization of them by their opponents, their philosophy has generally been depicted as conservative, monolithic and moribund. However, it is difficult to ratify such judgments. As Aristotelians, these philosophers do not seem particularly conservative; they appear to have assimilated many of the scientific developments of the seventeenth century, and the diversity and range of their views is quite broad. Some of the doctrines peculiar to them, or their particular developments of older views, can be seen as the background against which modern philosophy developed.

scholarly journals Undoing the Psychologizing of the Psychological

2019 ◽  
pp. 69-73
Author(s):  
Arata Hamawaki
Keyword(s):  
Modern Philosophy ◽  
Propositional Attitude ◽  
Human Action ◽  
First Person ◽  
Sharp Boundary ◽  
Stanley Cavell ◽  
Philosophical Investigations ◽  
Logical Order ◽  
Propositional Form

In “Aesthetic Problems of Modern Philosophy,” first published in 1965, and later collected in Must We Mean What We Say?, Stanley Cavell wrote: We know the efforts of such philosophers as Frege and Husserl to undo the “psychologizing” of logic (like Kant’s undoing Hume’s psychologizing of knowledge): now, the shortest way I might describe such a book as the Philosophical Investigations is to say that it attempts to undo the psychologizing of psychology, to show the necessity controlling our application of psychological and behavioral categories; even, one could say, show the necessities in human action and passion themselves. And at the same time it seems to turn all of philosophy into psychology—matters of what we call things, how we treat them, what their role is in our lives. Frege, of course, insisted on distinguishing between what is thought in any act of thinking, the content of thought, which he conceived of as having a propositional form, and the thinking of it. A thought is what can be common to different acts of thinking, whether of one’s own or of another. It is thus essentially public, essentially shareable, unowned. By contrast the thinking of a thought is necessarily someone’s, necessarily owned, and so in that sense private. Frege depsychologized logic, by excluding the psychological from it. The logical must bear no trace of the psychological, for if that were not so, there would be nothing that could be true or false—and so no judgment, no belief, no propositional attitude, as thoughts have subsequently come to be called. There would be in Thomas Rickett’s memorable words, merely “mooing.” The first person is consequently banished from the logical order, for a first person thought is constituted by the thinking of it. But in depsychologizing logic as he did, Frege seemed to have psychologized psychology. Thus, in speaking of the Investigations as undoing the psychologizing of psychology, I take it, Stanley meant that it seeks to undo what Frege did. However, this doesn’t mean undoing what Frege undid, that is, erasing the sharp boundary between the logical and the psychological, but rather to not cede the psychological to psychology: what the PI calls for is to further what Frege began, but, as it were, against Frege. In other words, Stanley saw Wittgenstein as reintroducing the first person as essential to the logical order, the order of what we think.

Introduction: unsettling subjects of justice and ethics

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ruth Sheldon
Keyword(s):  
Free Speech ◽  
Ludwig Wittgenstein ◽  
Stanley Cavell ◽  
High Profile ◽  
Democratic Life

This chapter begins with an ethnographic account of the high profile student conflicts around free speech and racism which unfolded across UK campuses in 2008-9 in response to ‘Operation Cast Lead’. The discussion focuses on the unsettling quality of these events in order to introduce a number of key elements in the framing of this study. First, the chapter highlights how campus struggles around Palestine-Israel are not only constituted through competing discourses in the abstract but are also the locus of intense feelings, contradictory desires and visceral interpersonal encounters. Second, is argued that these raging campus conflicts over Palestine-Israel involve the destabilisation of established spatial boundaries under conditions of globalisation and so can be helpfully connected to Nancy Fraser’s theory of ‘abnormal justice’. Third, by highlighting how this case is also the focus of disputed historical claims, the chapter introduces helpful resonances with aesthetic notions of the tragic. The chapter concludes by introducing some key interlocutors - Ludwig Wittgenstein, Stanley Cavell and Veena Das - who will help with a key task of this book: to develop an ethnographic imagination attentive to movements between the discursive/embodied and public/personal dimensions of democratic life.

Legal Recharacterization and the Materiality of Facts at the International Criminal Court: Which Changes Are Permissible?

2016 ◽  
Vol 29 (2) ◽  
pp. 577-597 ◽  
Author(s):  
ELINOR FRY
Keyword(s):  
International Criminal Court ◽  
International Criminal ◽  
Trial Chamber ◽  
Criminal Court ◽  
Contextual Elements ◽  
At Will ◽  
As If

AbstractThe ICC's Regulation 55, which allows the Trial Chamber to modify the legal characterization of facts in the final judgment, has been used too often and too carelessly. Recharacterization must not exceed the facts and circumstances described in the charges, but material facts and their legal qualification are like communicating vessels; changing the latter affects the former (and vice versa). In their application of Regulation 55 to date, chambers have underappreciated this, treating cases as if they have blurry factual boundaries where material facts can be swapped, neglected, or created at will. This article is not a plea for abolition of Regulation 55, though, but explores which modifications are permissible, and finds that when comparing a change regarding the contextual elements or (sub)categories of crimes to a change regarding the mode of participation the latter is most problematic and often detrimental to the rights of the accused.

scholarly journals Oeditorial Repression: The Case Histories of Hemingway and the Fitzgeralds

Prospects ◽  
2005 ◽  
Vol 30 ◽  
pp. 471-486
Author(s):  
Margaret Vandenburg
Keyword(s):  
Case Histories ◽  
Repetition Compulsion ◽  
Garden Of Eden ◽  
Tender Is The Night ◽  
Crisis Of Masculinity ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Room Of One's Own ◽  
Individual Talent ◽  
As If

With the persistence of repetition compulsion, Modernists define their movement vis-à-vis the classic Freudian assumption that sexuality is the mainspring of virtually everything, including literary merit. The most libidinous of their aesthetic manifestos is Ezra Pound's characterization of creativity as a “phallus or spermatozoid charging, head-on, the female chaos … driving a new idea into the great passive vulva of London.” Though C. G. Jung is far less enamored of the phallus, he endows masculinity with the “creative and procreative” power of Logos, which, echoing Pound, he calls the “spermatic word.” As if to fend off “scribbling women,” Jung warns that “mental masculinization of the woman has unwelcome results,” most notably frigidity, homosexuality, and “a deadly boring kind of sophistry.” Gertrude Stein's iconoclasm notwithstanding, her paradoxical assertion that her genius is masculine simultaneously reifies and defies this theory that biology determines literary destiny. In the Modernist canon, the pen is a penis, even when a cigar is just a cigar. The most influential of the movement's manifestos, T. S. Eliot's “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” codifies aesthetic essentialism, positing an Oedipal model of canonicity contingent on the authority of literary fathers. Even Virginia Woolf's rejection of gendered canonicity inA Room of One's Ownassumes its tenacity, as if she were protesting too much against the inevitable.Woolf is not alone in protesting too much. Modernism's swaggering canonicity masks a castration anxiety that debilitated F. Scott Fitzgerald and even bedeviled Papa Hemingway inThe Garden of Eden. One of Hemingway's most famous letters to Fitzgerald, written during the tortured composition ofTender Is the Night, provides a paradigmatic example of the Modernist crisis of masculinity:We are all bitched from the start and you especially have to be hurt like hell before you can write seriously. But when you get the damned hurt use it – don't cheat with it…. You see, Bo, you're not a tragic character.

scholarly journals The Oral and Skin Microbiomes of Captive Komodo Dragons Are Significantly Shared with Their Habitat

mSystems ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 1 (4) ◽  
Author(s):  
Embriette R. Hyde ◽  
Jose A. Navas-Molina ◽  
Se Jin Song ◽  
Jordan G. Kueneman ◽  
Gail Ackermann ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Chronic Illness ◽  
Radical Change ◽  
Natural Conditions ◽  
Host Environment ◽  
Full Characterization ◽  
Open Environments ◽  
In Captivity ◽  
Crucial Information ◽  
Health And Disease

ABSTRACT Animals, including humans, have evolved in the context of exposure to a variety of microbial organisms present in the environment. Only recently have humans, and some animals, begun to spend a significant amount of time in enclosed artificial environments, rather than in the more natural spaces in which most of evolution took place. The consequences of this radical change in lifestyle likely extend to the microbes residing in and on our bodies and may have important implications for health and disease. A full characterization of host-microbe sharing in both closed and open environments will provide crucial information that may enable the improvement of health in humans and in captive animals, both of which experience a greater incidence of disease (including chronic illness) than counterparts living under more ecologically natural conditions. Examining the way in which animals, including those in captivity, interact with their environment is extremely important for studying ecological processes and developing sophisticated animal husbandry. Here we use the Komodo dragon (Varanus komodoensis) to quantify the degree of sharing of salivary, skin, and fecal microbiota with their environment in captivity. Both species richness and microbial community composition of most surfaces in the Komodo dragon’s environment are similar to the Komodo dragon’s salivary and skin microbiota but less similar to the stool-associated microbiota. We additionally compared host-environment microbiome sharing between captive Komodo dragons and their enclosures, humans and pets and their homes, and wild amphibians and their environments. We observed similar host-environment microbiome sharing patterns among humans and their pets and Komodo dragons, with high levels of human/pet- and Komodo dragon-associated microbes on home and enclosure surfaces. In contrast, only small amounts of amphibian-associated microbes were detected in the animals’ environments. We suggest that the degree of sharing between the Komodo dragon microbiota and its enclosure surfaces has important implications for animal health. These animals evolved in the context of constant exposure to a complex environmental microbiota, which likely shaped their physiological development; in captivity, these animals will not receive significant exposure to microbes not already in their enclosure, with unknown consequences for their health. IMPORTANCE Animals, including humans, have evolved in the context of exposure to a variety of microbial organisms present in the environment. Only recently have humans, and some animals, begun to spend a significant amount of time in enclosed artificial environments, rather than in the more natural spaces in which most of evolution took place. The consequences of this radical change in lifestyle likely extend to the microbes residing in and on our bodies and may have important implications for health and disease. A full characterization of host-microbe sharing in both closed and open environments will provide crucial information that may enable the improvement of health in humans and in captive animals, both of which experience a greater incidence of disease (including chronic illness) than counterparts living under more ecologically natural conditions.

scholarly journals Plato and modern natural sciences

2019 ◽  
Vol 62 (3) ◽  
pp. 17-28
Author(s):  
Aleksandar Kandic
Keyword(s):  
Cosmological Model ◽  
Modern Philosophy ◽  
Philosophy Of Science ◽  
Natural Sciences ◽  
Modern Natural ◽  
Biological Concepts ◽  
The Republic ◽  
Genuine Knowledge ◽  
Science Experience

There are almost irreconcilable differences between Plato?s notion of science (episteme) and the modern notion, but also certain similarities. In the late dialogues such as The Theaetetus, The Philebus, and The Timaeus, Plato redefines his own notion of knowledge developed in The Republic to some extent. Genuine knowledge does not refer solely to the unchangeable aspects of reality. Plato?s characterization of cosmology as an eikos logos (?likely story?) in The Timaeus is an anticipation of the concept of falsifiability that dominates modern philosophy of science. Experience and observation, as well as mathematical, psychological and biological concepts, occupy a significant, indispensable place within the structure of Timaeus? cosmological model.

scholarly journals El criterio artístico

2021 ◽  
Vol 18 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fernando Infante del Rosal
Keyword(s):  
Aesthetic Theory ◽  
Stanley Cavell ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Aesthetic Criterion

La disciplina estética se ha interesado frecuentemente por el criterio estético –aquel por el que se discrimina o se determina qué es y qué no es el arte, o bien si algo es o no arte– pero raras veces se ha preguntado qué son y cómo operan los criterios artísticos, aquellos que están implicados en la creación o la crítica. Este artículo pretende ofrecer una caracterización de tales criterios a partir de su relación con la regla y con el juicio, elementos que remiten al pensamiento de Hume y de Kant respectivamente. Se presenta también una revisión de las ideas de autores como Stanley Cavell o Yves Michaud acerca del criterio. The aesthetic theory has often been interested in aesthetic criterion – that one that discriminates or determines what art is and what is not, or whether if something is art or not – but it has rarely asked what are the artistic criteria and how they operate (understanding by artistic criteria those that are involved in creation or criticism). This article aims to provide a characterization of such criteria starting from their relationship with standard and judgement, elements that refer to the thought of Hume and Kant respectively. A review of the ideas of authors such as Stanley Cavell or Yves Michaud about the criteria is also presented.

scholarly journals Undinge, Coffee Cup Lids, and Reinhabiting Spaces: Some Notes on a Register of a (Post-)Critical Philosophical Life

2020 ◽  
Vol 3 (9) ◽  
Author(s):  
Stefan Ramaekers
Keyword(s):  
Ludwig Wittgenstein ◽  
Stanley Cavell ◽  
Philosophical Life

The analyses in this issue on post-critique strike me as doing a particular kind of work, which I discuss in terms of ‘finding (post-)critique’s exact space’. And the philosophers developing the analyses all seem to be engaged, each in their own way, in a practice which I will discuss in terms of ‘reinhabiting a space of (post-)critique’. I will draw on Ludwig Wittgenstein and Stanley Cavell to develop a few reflections on this.

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