Suchergebnisse

Introduction: Stanley Cavell and the claim to community / Andrew Norris --Wittgenstein and Cavell : anthropology, skepticism, and politics / Sandra Laugier -- Bringing truth home : Mill, Wittgenstein, Cavell, and moral perfectionism / Piergiorgio Donatelli -- Telling the dancer from the dance : on the relevance of the ordinary for political thought / Joseph Lima and Tracy B. Strong -- Political revisions : Stanley Cavell and political philosophy / Andrew Norris -- Perfectionism without perfection : Cavell, Montaigne and the conditions of morals and politics / Richard Flathman -- Perfectionism, parrhesia, and the care of the self : Foucault and Cavell on ethics and politics / David Owen -- Stanley Cavell and the limits of appreciation / Ted Cohen -- Cavell and political romanticism / Espen Hammer -- Stanley Cavell and the pursuits of happiness / Hans Sluga -- Cordelia's calculus : love and loneliness in Cavell's reading of Lear / Thomas L. Dumm -- Aesthetics and receptivity : Kant, Nietzsche, Cavell, and Astaire / Robert Gooding-Williams -- The incessance and the absence of the political / Stanley Cavell

'Becoming Who We Are' clarifies the political and existential aspects of Stanley Cavell's understanding of ordinary language and of skepticism, and shows the close connection between his reception of Kant, Heidegger, and Austin and his exploration of what Emersonian Perfectionism offers to democracy and modern life

The Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben is having an increasingly significant impact on Anglo-American political theory. His most prominent intervention to date is the powerful reassessment of sovereignty and the politics of life and death laid out in his multivolume Homo Sacer project. Agamben argues that in both the modern world and the ancient, politics inevitably involves a sovereign decision that bans some individuals from the political and human communities. For Agamben, the Nazi concentration camps--in which some inmates are reduced to a form of living death--are not a political aberration but instead the place where this essential political decision about life most clearly reveals itself. Engaging specifically with Homo Sacer, the essays in this collection draw out and contend with the wide-ranging implications of Agamben's radical and controversial interpretation of modern political life. The contributors analyze Agamben's thought from the perspectives of political theory, philosophy, jurisprudence, and the history of law. They consider his work not only in relation to that of his major interlocutors--Hannah Arendt, Michel Foucault, Carl Schmitt, Walter Benjamin, and Martin Heidegger--but also in relation to the thought of Plato, Pindar, Heraclitus, Descartes, Kafka, Bataille, and Derrida. The essayists' approaches are varied, as are their ultimate evaluations of the cogency and accuracy of Agamben's arguments. This volume also includes an original essay by Agamben in which he considers the relation of Benjamin's "Critique of Violence" to Schmitt's Political Theology. Politics, Metaphysics, and Death is a necessary, multifaceted exposition and evaluation of the thought of one of today's most important political theorists. Contributors: Giorgio Agamben, Andrew Benjamin, Peter Fitzpatrick, Anselm Haverkamp, Paul Hegarty, Andreas Kalyvas, Rainer Maria Kiesow , Catherine Mills, Andrew Norris, Adam Thurschwell, Erik Vogt, Thomas Carl Wall

Michael Oakeshott provides the best articulation of the widespread view that the moral foundations of the modern state limit it to the defense and maintenance of a system of formal rules governing individuals and non-state enterprises. While this understanding of the proper relation between individual and state has been challenged by liberals of a more Rawlsian persuasion, these criticisms have persuaded few to change their minds, as they rest upon assumptions that are plainly incompatible with the view under consideration. I argue that, rightly understood, central and attractive features of Oakeshott's own conception of understanding, philosophy, individuality, and education lead to significantly different conclusions than those embraced by Oakeshott himself. The "morality of individuality" upon which Oakeshott rests his strict restrictions on the use of state power requires that we be open to the use of that power to guarantee that all receive the education postulated by individuality.

AbstractIn this essay I ask what Wittgenstein means when he writes in the introductory section of his "Remarks on Frazer's Golden Bough," "I must plunge into the water of doubt again and again." This comment is both significant and obscure. Although Wittgenstein did not himself publish the "Remarks," he took care to organize them, and rejected other introductory comments in favor of the ones that now open the "Remarks" and which conclude with this sentence. But it is not clear what role doubt plays in the "Remarks," as Wittgenstein neither mentions it again not assumes a doubtful posture towards what he describes as Frazer's errors. I argue that the sentence is meant to apply first and foremost not to Frazer but to Wittgenstein himself, and that, when read carefully, it refers to a kind of baptism. Appreciating this should decisively shape our understanding of the "Remarks" and has implications for our understanding of the Philosophical Investigations, which echoes and repeats many of the central ideas and even formulations of the earlier text. In particular, it underscores the importance of the idea of disorientation to Wittgenstein's later work. Being doubtful or disoriented is not just a difficulty to be solved or avoided, but a beneficial process through which one must pass, as Wittgenstein says, again and again.

Stanley Cavell's philosophical work is much more wide-ranging than that of almost all of his contemporaries, including as it does serious contributions to our understanding of the philosophy of language, epistemology, philosophical aesthetics, Romanticism, Transcendentalism, Shakespeare and film. Cavell's work in these disparate fields is unified by his distinctive voice and vocabulary, his habit of combining close textual analysis with starting allusions and associations, and a number of recurrent themes, including the ordinary, perfectionism, modernism, remarriage, education, conversation and conversion. The most central of these themes to Cavell's work as a whole is that of skepticism, and Cavell's unique formulation of what skepticism involves inflects each of the others. Accordingly, it is not easy to say succinctly what skepticism is and means for Cavell. Its exposition has taken him a fruitful lifetime of work. But it can profitably be thought of as a name for an expression of human finitude and the human discontent with that finitude. The acceptance of our finitude for Cavell entails accepting the world and acknowledging those with whom we share it, tasks we find surprisingly difficult and uncongenial. The desire to evade them lies at the heart of both the skeptic's procedures, and, I want to suggest, much of the pathology of modern political life. Adapted from the source document.

In this essay I situate Philippe Nonet's reading of the Antigone within his larger Heideggerian Destruktion of the tradition of Western legal philosophy. I argue that the sweeping terms of Nonet's condemnation of that tradition as a mode of nihilism place significant strains upon his reading of the tragedy, and, more importantly, leave little reason to hope that an appreciation of the law Nonet sees embodied in the Gestalt of Antigone's person will help us understand or address, even indirectly, the problems with which Recht and Gesetz are concerned.