The Sound of Bedrock: Lines of Grammar between Kant, Wittgenstein, and Cavell

European Journal of Philosophy 24 (2):607-628 (2016)
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Abstract

In ‘Aesthetics Problems of Modern Philosophy’ Stanley Cavell proposes, first, that Kant's characterization of judgments of beauty may be read as a Wittgensteinian grammatical characterization, and, second, that the philosophical appeal to ‘what we say and mean’ partakes of the grammar of judgment of beauty. I argue first that the expression of the dawning of an aspect partakes of the grammar of judgments of beauty as characterized by Kant, and may also be seen—on a prevailing way of thinking about concepts and how they relate to their instances—to have the same kind of significance that judgments of beauty have according to Kant. And then I argue that there are good reasons for being suspicious of the prevailing conception of concepts, and therefore good reasons for being suspicious of the proposed understanding of the significance of aspect perception—an understanding that has attracted many readers of Wittgenstein's remarks on aspects. This leads me to suggest that it is actually the philosophical appeal to ordinary language that has the kind of significance that the Kantian picture attributes to judgments of beauty and to the seeing of aspects. In this way, I offer a way to vindicate Cavell's second proposal.

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Avner Baz
Tufts University

References found in this work

Philosophical investigations.Ludwig Wittgenstein & G. E. M. Anscombe - 1953 - Revue Philosophique de la France Et de l'Etranger 161:124-124.
Critique of the power of judgment.Immanuel Kant - 2000 - New York: Cambridge University Press. Edited by Paul Guyer.
Critique of pure reason.Immanuel Kant - 2007 - In Elizabeth Schmidt Radcliffe, Richard McCarty, Fritz Allhoff & Anand Vaidya (eds.), Late modern philosophy: essential readings with commentary. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. pp. 449-451.
Phenomenology of Perception.Aron Gurwitsch, M. Merleau-Ponty & Colin Smith - 1964 - Philosophical Review 73 (3):417.

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