Stanley Cavell, Literature, and Film

Stanley Cavell, Literature, and Film PDF Author: Andrew Taylor
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 113615633X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 255

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Book Description
This is the first book to offer a thorough examination of the relationship that Stanley Cavell’s celebrated philosophical work has to the ways in which the United States has been imagined and articulated in its literature. Establishing the contours of Cavell’s most significant readings of American philosophical and cultural activity, the volume explores how his philosophy and the kind of reading it demands have an important relation to broader considerations of the American national imaginary. Focused, coherent, and original essays from a wide range of philosophers and critics consider how his investigations of Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson, for example, represent a sustained engagement with the ways in which philosophy might provide us with new ways of thinking and of living. This is the first detailed and comprehensive treatment of "America" as a category of enquiry in Cavell’s writing, engaging with the terms of Cavell’s various configurations of the nation and offering readings of American texts that illustrate the possibilities that Cavell’s work has, in turn, for literary and film criticism. This study of the role played by philosophy in the articulation of the American self-imaginary highlights the ways in which the reading of literature, and the practice of philosophy, are conjoined in the ethical and political project of national self-definition.

Art of the Ordinary

Art of the Ordinary PDF Author: Richard Deming
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501720155
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 219

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Book Description
Cutting across literature, film, art, and philosophy, Art of the Ordinary is a trailblazing, cross-disciplinary engagement with the ordinary and the everyday. Because, writes Richard Deming, the ordinary is always at hand, it is, in fact, too familiar for us to perceive it and become fully aware of it. The ordinary he argues, is what most needs to be discovered and yet is something that can never be approached, since to do so is to immediately change it. Art of the Ordinary explores how philosophical questions can be revealed in surprising places—as in a stand-up comic’s routine, for instance, or a Brillo box, or a Hollywood movie. From negotiations with the primary materials of culture and community, ways of reading "self" and "other" are made available, deepening one’s ability to respond to ethical, social, and political dilemmas. Deming picks out key figures, such as the philosophers Stanley Cavell, Arthur Danto, and Richard Wollheim; poet John Ashbery; artist Andy Warhol; and comedian Steven Wright, to showcase the foundational concepts of language, ethics, and society. Deming interrogates how acts of the imagination by these people, and others, become the means for transforming the alienated ordinary into a presence of the everyday that constantly and continually creates opportunities of investment in its calls on interpretive faculties. In Art of the Ordinary, Deming brings together the arts, philosophy, and psychology in new and compelling ways so as to offer generative, provocative insights into how we think and represent the world to others as well as to ourselves.

Revolution of the Ordinary

Revolution of the Ordinary PDF Author: Toril Moi
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022646444X
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 307

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Book Description
This radically original book argues for the power of ordinary language philosophy—a tradition inaugurated by Ludwig Wittgenstein and J. L. Austin, and extended by Stanley Cavell—to transform literary studies. In engaging and lucid prose, Toril Moi demonstrates this philosophy’s unique ability to lay bare the connections between words and the world, dispel the notion of literature as a monolithic concept, and teach readers how to learn from a literary text. Moi first introduces Wittgenstein’s vision of language and theory, which refuses to reduce language to a matter of naming or representation, considers theory’s desire for generality doomed to failure, and brings out the philosophical power of the particular case. Contrasting ordinary language philosophy with dominant strands of Saussurean and post-Saussurean thought, she highlights the former’s originality, critical power, and potential for creative use. Finally, she challenges the belief that good critics always read below the surface, proposing instead an innovative view of texts as expression and action, and of reading as an act of acknowledgment. Intervening in cutting-edge debates while bringing Wittgenstein, Austin, and Cavell to new readers, Revolution of the Ordinary will appeal beyond literary studies to anyone looking for a philosophically serious account of why words matter.

Why We Need Ordinary Language Philosophy

Why We Need Ordinary Language Philosophy PDF Author: Sandra Laugier
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022682957X
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 162

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Book Description
Now in paperback, Sandra Laugier's reconsideration of analytic philosophy and ordinary language. Sandra Laugier has long been a key liaison between American and European philosophical thought, responsible for bringing American philosophers such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Stanley Cavell to French readers—but until now her books have never been published in English. Why We Need Ordinary Language Philosophy rights that wrong with a topic perfect for English-language readers: the idea of analytic philosophy. Focused on clarity and logical argument, analytic philosophy has dominated the discipline in the United States, Australia, and Britain over the past one hundred years, and it is often seen as a unified, coherent, and inevitable advancement. Laugier questions this assumption, rethinking the very grounds that drove analytic philosophy to develop and uncovering its inherent tensions and confusions. Drawing on J. L. Austin and the later works of Ludwig Wittgenstein, she argues for the solution provided by ordinary language philosophy—a philosophy that trusts and utilizes the everyday use of language and the clarity of meaning it provides—and in doing so offers a major contribution to the philosophy of language and twentieth- and twenty-first-century philosophy as a whole.

When Words Are Called For

When Words Are Called For PDF Author: Avner Baz
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674068483
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 273

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Book Description
A new form of philosophizing known as ordinary language philosophy took root in England after the Second World War, promising a fresh start and a way out of long-standing dead-end philosophical debates. Pioneered by Wittgenstein, Austin, and others, OLP is now widely rumored, within mainstream analytic philosophy, to have been seriously discredited, and consequently its perspective is ignored. Avner Baz begs to differ. In When Words Are Called For, he shows how the prevailing arguments against OLP collapse under close scrutiny. All of them, he claims, presuppose one version or another of the very conception of word-meaning that OLP calls into question and takes to be responsible for many traditional philosophical difficulties. Worse, analytic philosophy itself has suffered as a result of its failure to take OLP’s perspective seriously. Baz blames a neglect of OLP’s insights for seemingly irresolvable disputes over the methodological relevance of “intuitions” in philosophy and for misunderstandings between contextualists and anti-contextualists (or “invariantists”) in epistemology. Baz goes on to explore the deep affinities between Kant’s work and OLP and suggests ways that OLP could be applied to other philosophically troublesome concepts. When Words Are Called For defends OLP not as a doctrine but as a form of practice that might provide a viable alternative to work currently carried out within mainstream analytic philosophy. Accordingly, Baz does not merely argue for OLP but, all the more convincingly, practices it in this eye-opening book.

Philosophy and Ordinary Language

Philosophy and Ordinary Language PDF Author: Oswald Hanfling
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134352131
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 284

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Book Description
What is philosophy about and what are its methods? Philosophy and Ordinary Language is a defence of the view that philosophy is largely about questions of language, which to a large extent means ordinary language. Some people argue that if philosophy is about ordinary language, then it is necessarily less deep and difficult than it is usually taken to be but Oswald Hanfling shows us that this isn't true. Hanfling, a leading expert in the development of analytic philosophy, covers a wide range of topics, including scepticism and the definition of knowledge, free will, empiricism, folk psychology, ordinary versus artificial logic, and philosophy versus science. Drawing on philosophers such as Austin, Wittgenstein, and Quine, this book explores the nature of ordinary language in philosophy.

On Philosophy, Intelligibility, and the Ordinary

On Philosophy, Intelligibility, and the Ordinary PDF Author: Randy Ramal
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1793638810
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 271

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Book Description
Randy Ramal argues that philosophy’s main responsibility lies in providing intelligibility to the ordinary language of everyday life while dispelling unwarranted skepticism. Philosophers need to go the hard way to fulfill this responsibility because of the constant and dangerous temptation to turn philosophy into a normative discipline rather than keep it as a descriptively hermeneutical enterprise. In On Philosophy, Intelligibility, and the Ordinary: Going the Bloody Hard Way, the philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead is central to Ramal’s endeavor to demonstrate the need to separate the hermeneutical responsibility of philosophy from the normative aspects of responsibility. While showing the futility of labeling Whitehead as a purely disinterested philosopher who abandons the idea that ordinariness is relevant to good philosophical thinking, Ramal frames this discussion within a larger, in-depth engagement with a vast number of thinkers, philosophers, and literary figures whose works touch on the question of the ordinary.

Lectures on a Philosophy Less Ordinary

Lectures on a Philosophy Less Ordinary PDF Author: Niklas Forsberg
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000468534
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 296

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Book Description
This book offers a comprehensive reinterpretation of J.L. Austin’s philosophy. It opens new ways of thinking about ethics and other contemporary issues in the wake of Austin’s philosophical work. Austin is primarily viewed as a philosopher of language whose work focused on the pragmatic aspects of speech. His work on ordinary language philosophy and speech act theory is seen as his main contribution to philosophy. This book challenges this received view to show that Austin used his most well-known theoretical notions as heuristic tools aimed at debunking the fact/value dichotomy. Additionally, it demonstrates that Austin’s continual returns to the ordinary is rooted in a desire to show that our lives in language are complicated and multifaceted. What emerges is an attempt to think with Austin about problems that are central to philosophy today—such as the question about linguistic inheritance, truth, the relationship between a language inherited and morality, and how we are to cope with linguistic elasticity and historicity. Lectures on a Philosophy Less Ordinary will appeal to scholars and advanced students working on Austin’s philosophy, philosophy of language, and the history of analytic philosophy.

Finding a Replacement for the Soul

Finding a Replacement for the Soul PDF Author: Brett Bourbon
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674028597
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 290

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Book Description
Approaching the study of literature as a unique form of the philosophy of language and mind--as a study of how we produce nonsense and imagine it as sense--this is a book about our human ways of making and losing meaning. Brett Bourbon asserts that our complex and variable relation with language defines a domain of meaning and being that is misconstrued and missed in philosophy, in literary studies, and in our ordinary understanding of what we are and how things make sense. Accordingly, his book seeks to demonstrate how the study of literature gives us the means to understand this relationship. The book itself is framed by the literary and philosophical challenges presented by Joyce's Finnegan's Wake and Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations. With reference to these books and the problems of interpretation and meaning that they pose, Bourbon makes a case for the fundamental philosophical character of the study of literature, and for its dependence on theories of meaning disguised as theories of mind. Within this context, he provides original accounts of what sentences, fictions, non-fictions, and poems are; produces a new account of the logical form of fiction and of the limits of interpretation that follow from it; and delineates a new and fruitful domain of inquiry in which literature, philosophy, and science intersect. Table of Contents: Preface Note on Abbreviations Introduction: What Are We When We Are Not? Part I The Surface of Language and the Absence of Meaning 1. From Soul-Making to Person-Making 2. The Logical Form of Fiction 3. The Emptiness of Literary Interpretation 4. To Be But Not To Mean 5. How Do Oracles Mean? Part II Senses and Nonsenses: Joyce's Finnegans Wake and Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations 6. A Twitterlitter of Nonsense: Askesis at Finnegans Wake 7. The Analogy between Persons and Words 8. "The Human Body Is the Best Picture of the Human Soul" 9. The Senses of Time 10. Being Something and Meaning Something Bibliography Acknowledgments Index This is an adventurous and unusual book. Bourbon moves back and forth between literary and philosophical contexts with ease, showing in multifarious ways how the one can, often in unexpected ways, illuminate the other. Throughout these wide-ranging explorations Bourbon uncovers a good deal about both the nature of literary meaning and our distinctive -- if tellingly irreducible -- relations to literary texts. --Garry L. Hagberg, author of Art as Language: Wittgenstein, Meaning, and Aesthetic Theory and Meaning and Interpretation: Wittgenstein, Henry James, and Literary Knowledge

Ordinary Literature Philosophy

Ordinary Literature Philosophy PDF Author: Jernej Habjan
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 135008607X
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 193

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Book Description
Introduction: Literature and Speech Acts from Austin to Derrida to Butler -- 1. Literature as Parasite: Austin Excludes Poetry as a Parasite of Speech Acts -- Ad 1: Austin's Poetry in Dead Poets Society -- 2. Parasite as Necessary Possibility: Derrida Elevates the Parasite as the Poetry of Speech Acts -- Ad 2: Derrida's Parasite in Romeo and Juliet -- 3. Necessary Possibility as Necessary Actuality: Butler Finds Poetry in Every Parasite -- Ad 3: Butler's Poetry of Parasites in We Are all Jews and Germans -- Conclusion: Literature and Political Disagreement from Austin to Rancière to Ducrot.

Ordinary Unhappiness

Ordinary Unhappiness PDF Author: Jon Baskin
Publisher: Square One: First-Order Questi
ISBN: 9781503608337
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 200

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Book Description
This book approaches David Foster Wallace not only as a fiction writer but also as a cultural critic and a moral philosopher whose formal innovations were intended as "therapies" for the pervasive dis-eases of our time.