Abstract
The chapter is devoted to Cavell’s analysis of the question of the world as it develops in his engagement with Descartes, Wittgenstein and Heidegger, but also with English Romanticism, Emerson and Thoreau. Cavell’s contention that the problem of philosophy is to accept ‘the truth of scepticism’—our relation to the world is not one of knowing with certainty—is traced in a detailed analysis of The Claim of Reason. The result of the skeptic’s investigation of the world rests in a desire for mastery that produces the death of the world at philosophy’s hands. If the skeptic’s gesture is death-dealing then one of the tasks of the reorienting of its conclusion would be to restore life to the world. Such recovery implies a change to philosophy’s understanding of its essential gesture.
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Notes
- 1.
See also Genova, J. (1995), Wittgenstein: A Way of Seeing. New York: Routledge.
- 2.
William Desmond traces a series of parallels between epistemological problems with regard to the externality of the world and the human other running in German philosophy. From Kant’s transcendental solipsism to Fichte’s and Hegel’s philosophical knowing as the culmination of the dialectical trawl, all these resonances, inherited, reverse or subverted, contribute to showing Cavell’s own move from knowledge to acknowledgment. Desmond, W. (2003). A Second Primavera: Cavell, German Philosophy, and Romanticism. In R. Eldridge (Ed.), Stanley Cavell: Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
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Rugo, D. (2016). Cavell and the Conditions of the World. In: Philosophy and the Patience of Film in Cavell and Nancy. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-58060-3_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-58060-3_2
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