Morals of Encounter in Steve Jobs

2020 ◽  
Vol 24 ◽  
pp. 134-155
Author(s):  
Kyle Barrowman ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Speech Acts ◽  
Film Studies ◽  
Ordinary Language ◽  
Test Case ◽  
Ordinary Language Philosophy ◽  
Language Philosophy ◽  
Stanley Cavell ◽  
Probative Value ◽  
Performative Utterance ◽  
Steve Jobs

In this article, the author argues for the probative value of ordinary language philosophy for the discipline of film studies by way of an analysis of the conversational protocols discernible in the film Steve Jobs (2015). In particular, the author focuses on the work of J.L. Austin, specifically his theory of speech acts and his formulation of the performative utterance, and Stanley Cavell, specifically his extension of Austinian speech act theory and his formulation of the passionate utterance, and analyzes the interactions between the titular character and his daughter through this unique Austinian/Cavellian lens. In so doing, the author endeavors to encourage more scholars in the field of film-philosophy to explore the key concepts and arguments in ordinary language philosophy for use in analyzing films. Despite its having been virtually ignored by film scholars over the last half century, one of many regrettable effects of the Continental bias of film scholars generally and film-philosophers specifically, the author contends that ordinary language philosophy provides powerful tools for the analysis of dialogue and communication in film, with Steve Jobs serving as a particularly insightful test case of the broad utility of ordinary language philosophy for film studies.

Cavell, Stanley (1926–)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen Mulhall
Keyword(s):  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Literary Theory ◽  
Film Studies ◽  
Ordinary Language ◽  
Ordinary Language Philosophy ◽  
Language Philosophy ◽  
Stanley Cavell ◽  
American Philosophy ◽  
Anglo American ◽  
Theory Of Value

Born in Atlanta, Georgia, Stanley Cavell has held the Walter M. Cabot Chair in Aesthetics and the General Theory of Value at Harvard University since 1963. The range, diversity and distinctiveness of his writings are unparalleled in twentieth-century Anglo-American philosophy. As well as publishing essays on modernist painting and music, he has created a substantial body of work in film studies, literary theory and literary criticism; he has introduced new and fruitful ways of thinking about psychoanalysis and its relationship with philosophy; and his work on Heidegger and Derrida, taken together with his attempts to revitalize the tradition of Emersonian Transcendentalism, have defined new possibilities for a distinctively American contribution to philosophical culture. This complex oeuvre is unified by a set of thematic concerns – relating to scepticism and moral perfectionism – which are rooted in Cavell’s commitment to the tradition of ordinary language philosophy, as represented in the work of J.L. Austin and Wittgenstein.

Cavell, Stanley (1926–)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen Mulhall
Keyword(s):  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Literary Theory ◽  
Film Studies ◽  
Ordinary Language ◽  
Ordinary Language Philosophy ◽  
Language Philosophy ◽  
Stanley Cavell ◽  
American Philosophy ◽  
Anglo American ◽  
Theory Of Value

Born in Atlanta, Georgia, Stanley Cavell held the Walter M. Cabot Chair in Aesthetics and the General Theory of Value at Harvard University from 1963 until his retirement in 1997. The range, diversity and distinctiveness of his writings are unparalleled in twentieth-century Anglo-American philosophy. As well as publishing essays on modernist painting and music, he has created a substantial body of work in film studies, literary theory and literary criticism; he has introduced new and fruitful ways of thinking about psychoanalysis and its relationship with philosophy; and his work on ‘Continental’ philosophers such as Nietzsche, Heidegger and Derrida, together with his attempts to revitalize the tradition of Emersonian Transcendentalism, has defined new possibilities for a distinctively American contribution to philosophical culture. This complex oeuvre is unified by a set of thematic concerns – relating to scepticism and moral perfectionism – which are rooted in Cavell’s commitment to the tradition of ordinary language philosophy, as represented in the work of J.L. Austin and Wittgenstein.

scholarly journals Reading Silence

2018 ◽  
pp. 74-94
Author(s):  
Larry Jackson
Keyword(s):  
Political Theory ◽  
Political Action ◽  
Ordinary Language ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Ordinary Language Philosophy ◽  
Language Philosophy ◽  
Stanley Cavell ◽  
Everyday Language ◽  
Theory Of Justice ◽  
Wide Range

Stanley Cavell roams across a wide range of fields in his first book, Must We Mean What We Say? most obviously those of epistemology, ethics, and aesthetics. But nowhere in the book’s ten essays does he advance an explicit political theory. Still, this book, published in 1969 and written over the course of the preceding decade, quietly poses persistent political questions, even in essays on such topics as skepticism and King Lear, Kierkegaard’s Book on Adler and Beckett’s Endgame, atonal music and ordinary language philosophy. Just who is the “we” spoken of in the book’s title (we philosophers? we Americans? we human beings?)? Is there any relationship between democratic equality and the philosophical appeal to our everyday language, as described in the book’s eponymous essay? 1 Does the account that Cavell offers in his piece on Wittgenstein of practices and behaviors shared across cultures—the “whirl of organism” of our forms of life—suggest a nascent theory of human solidarity? Our freedom in language and the responsibility we bear for meaning, topics of the book’s opening essays, raise the question of what we might owe to one another and how we might offer—or withhold—it in our choices of words. Is this the beginning of a theory of justice? The concept of acknowledgment, described in the book’s final essays as a response to the challenge of skepticism, shifts the problem from what I can know to what I might do. Is this a theory of moral or political action (or both)?

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”?

scholarly journals Film and skepticism Cavell’s „correction“ of poststructuralist philosophy of arts

2015 ◽  
Vol 26 (1) ◽  
pp. 205-225
Author(s):  
Nikola Dedic
Keyword(s):  
Film Theory ◽  
Ordinary Language ◽  
Ordinary Language Philosophy ◽  
Language Philosophy ◽  
Stanley Cavell ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Poststructuralist Theory ◽  
Utopian Theory

The main aim of this paper is the critique of poststructuralist theory of art, and particularly thesis about the avant-garde peace of art as a kind of transgression. As a starting point of this critique, the ordinary language philosophy developed by American philosopher Stanley Cavell is used, particularly his film theory. While poststructuralist philosophy was developed around the notion of ideology, Cavell interprets film and arts in general around the notion of skepticism. While poststructuralism, because of thesis about avant-garde as a kind of transgression within the field of ideology, is a kind of philosophy of negation, we point out that Cavell?s philosophy is a utopian theory of transcending of skepticism where avant-garde film has significant but not crucial place. Cavell?s thesis is used as a basis for re-thinking of modernism, which is in opposition to postmodernist turn realized by poststructuralism.

Pragmatics

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Francois Recanati
Keyword(s):  
Natural Language ◽  
Speech Acts ◽  
Formal Semantics ◽  
Ordinary Language ◽  
Formal Languages ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Ordinary Language Philosophy ◽  
Language Philosophy ◽  
Ideal Language ◽  
Truth Conditional

Analytic philosophers have made lasting contributions to the scientific study of language. Semantics (the study of meaning) and pragmatics (the study of language in use) are two important areas of linguistic research which owe their shape to the groundwork done by philosophers. Although the two disciplines are now conceived of as complementary, the philosophical movements out of which they grew were very much in competition. In the middle of the twentieth century, there were two opposing ‘camps’ within the analytic philosophy of language. The first – ‘ideal language philosophy’, as it was then called – was that of the pioneers, Frege, Russell and the logical positivists. They were, first and foremost, logicians studying formal languages and, through these formal languages, ‘language’ in general. Work in this tradition (especially that of Frege, Russell, Carnap, Tarski and later Montague) gave rise to contemporary formal semantics, a very active discipline developed jointly by logicians, philosophers and grammarians. The other camp was that of so-called ‘ordinary language philosophers’, who thought important features of natural language were not revealed, but hidden, by the logical approach initiated by Frege and Russell. They advocated a more descriptive approach, and emphasized the ‘pragmatic’ nature of natural language as opposed to, for example, the ‘language’ of Principia Mathematica. Their own work (especially that of Austin, Strawson, Grice and the later Wittgenstein) gave rise to contemporary pragmatics, a discipline which (like formal semantics) has developed successfully within linguistics in the past thirty years. From the general conception put forward by ordinary language philosophers, four areas or topics of research emerged, which jointly constitute the core of pragmatics: speech acts; indexicality and context-sensitivity; non-truth-conditional aspects of meaning; and contextual implications. In the first half of this entry, we look at these topics from the point of view of ordinary language philosophy; the second half presents the contemporary picture. From the first point of view, pragmatics is seen as an alternative to the truth-conditional approach to meaning associated with ideal language philosophy (and successfully pursued within formal semantics). From the second point of view, pragmatics merely supplements that approach.

The “Cinema Remarks”: Wittgenstein on Moving-Image Media and the Ethics of Re-viewing

October ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 171 ◽  
pp. 47-76
Author(s):  
Kate Rennebohm
Keyword(s):  
Final Section ◽  
Ordinary Language ◽  
Ordinary Language Philosophy ◽  
Language Philosophy ◽  
Ethical Thought ◽  
Stanley Cavell ◽  
Moving Image ◽  
Phenomenological Experience ◽  
Film And Media Studies ◽  
Nature Of Time

This essay uncovers and analyzes philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein's little-known writings on film and related media, revealing their importance for film and media studies, the field of film philosophy, and for understanding Wittgenstein's later ethical thought. Through an explication of Wittgenstein's idiosyncratic ordinary-language philosophy, the author argues that these cinema remarks speak to Wittgenstein's sense that cinematic media offered new conceptualizations for thought on a variety of subjects. These include the nature of time, visual and phenomenological experience, and subjectivity. The remarks make clear, among other discoveries, that Wittgenstein was thinking about the relation of cinema and “the skeptical mindset” decades before Stanley Cavell made his influential arguments for such a connection. While the first half of the essay draws out the ethical stakes behind Wittgenstein's film remarks, the latter half turns explicitly to the philosopher's later, complex thought about ethics itself. Showing the importance of aesthetics, visuality, and sight to Wittgenstein's understanding of the field, this section addresses his notions of “aspect-seeing” and “aspect-change.” From this, the final section of contends that Wittgenstein's ethics want to work in the way he feels film can—by enabling one to “see anew” one's way of seeing as a way of seeing, thus opening new ethical-existential possibilities for one's way of being in the world.

A.J. Ayer and J.L. Austin: from “Ethical Judgements” to “Performative”

2019 ◽  
Vol 56 (3) ◽  
pp. 76-87
Author(s):  
Roman A. Yuriev ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Speech Acts ◽  
Mutual Influence ◽  
Ethical Judgment ◽  
Ordinary Language ◽  
Research Literature ◽  
Logical Positivism ◽  
Necessary Condition ◽  
Language Games ◽  
Ordinary Language Philosophy ◽  
Language Philosophy

The article considers the thesis about A. Ayer’s radical empiricism as one of the possible conceptual sources for the development of the theory of J. Austin’s speech acts. In contemporary research literature more attention is devoted to the inquiry of the discussion between A. Ayer and J. Austin on the matter of “sense-data”. At the same time it can be stated that few attention is devoted to the historical and philosophical reconstruction of their mutual influence. The importance of this kind of reconstruction is caused by the fact that contention between A. Ayer and J. Austin in Oxford during 1930s and 1940s can be viewed as preliminary work of reception of the idea of L. Wittgenstein’s “language-games”. By comparing A. Ayer’s “empirical / ethical” and J. Austin’s “conservative / performative” oppositions one could show that A. Ayer’s earlier views on ethics expressed in his work “Language, Truth and Logic “cannot be unconditionally attributed to the logical positivism. Ayer’s following statements were considered: 1) ethical judgements state as judgments of arousal of feelings and stimulation to action; 2) ethical judgements state as expression of ethical feelings; 3) ethical judgements add nothing in terms of factual meaning; 4) feelings are not a necessary condition for their expression. In conclusion one can say that in a certain sense Ayer’s approach to the ethical judgment is open to understanding that the meaning of a word is its use in the language. The results of its ethical analysis can be viewed as an important impulse to the development of ordinary language philosophy. Therefore, it is possible to consider logical positivism as including the inevitable premises for creation the ordinary language philosophy.

Genre Blindness in the New Descriptivism

2020 ◽  
Vol 81 (4) ◽  
pp. 527-552
Author(s):  
Tim Dean
Keyword(s):  
Ordinary Language ◽  
Vantage Point ◽  
Theory And Practice ◽  
Literary Studies ◽  
Ordinary Language Philosophy ◽  
Language Philosophy ◽  
Stanley Cavell ◽  
Mark Doty ◽  
History Of ◽  
Forensic Rhetoric

Abstract This essay considers the “descriptive turn” in literary studies from the vantage point of poetics, arguing that the history of Western poetry, from the Greeks to the present, offers through the category of epideixis a theory and practice of description that illuminates some of the methodological impasses of contemporary literary studies. Epideixis, a basic mode of pointing or linguistic ostension, confers value, often by way of praise or blame, without trying to persuade its audience with the practical immediacy of political or forensic rhetoric. Drawing on the ordinary language philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein and Stanley Cavell, the essay suggests that praise constitutes a philosophically rigorous alternative to critique. This argument is exemplified via the work of Mark Doty, a contemporary poet of description-as-praise.

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