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 ...

This paper studies the concept of form of life as central to ordinary language philosophy : philosophy of our language as spoken ; pronounced by a human voice within a form of life. Such an approach to Wittgenstein’s later philosophy shifts the question of the common use of language – central to Wittgenstein’s Investigations – to the definition of the subject as voice, and to the reinvention of subjectivity in language. The voice is both a subjective and common expression: it (...) is what makes it possible for my individual voice, or claim, to become shared and for our forms of life to be intertwined with a lifeform. (shrink)

The ethics of care has contributed to modifying a dominant conception of ethics and changed the way we conceive vulnerability. It has introduced ethical stakes into politics, weakening, through its critique of theories of justice, the seemingly obvious link between an ethics of justice and political liberalism. However, care corresponds to a quite ordinary reality: the fact that people look after one another, take care of one another and thus are responsible. The aim of this paper is to connect the (...) ethics of care to the idea of the vulnerability of the human as it is developed in the moral philosophy inspired by Wittgenstein. (shrink)

Pierre Hadot, professor of ancient philosophy at the Collège de France, published, in the late 1950s and early 1960s, some of the earliest work on Wittgenstein to appear in French. Hadot conceived of philosophy as an activity rather than a body of doctrines and found in Wittgenstein a fruitful point of departure for ethical reflection. Hadot's understanding of philosophy as a spiritual exercise — articulated through his reading of ancient philosophy but also the American transcendentalists Henry David Thoreau and Ralph (...) Waldo Emerson — will find an echo in Wittgenstinian thinkers such as Stanley Cavell and Cora Diamond. Ultimately philosophy for Hadot is a call to personal and political transformation. (shrink)

Must We Mean What We Say? is Stanley Cavell's first book, and, in a sense, it is his most important. It contains all the themes that Cavell continues to develop masterfully throughout his philosophy. There is a renewed usage of J. L. Austin's theory of speech acts, and, in the classic essay “The Availability of Wittgenstein's Later Philosophy,” he establishes the foundations of a radical reading of Ludwig Wittgenstein , the connections among skepticism, acknowledgement, and Shakespearean tragedy ; there is (...) the reflection on the ordinary that runs throughout his later works ; and, finally, there is the original aesthetic approach that defines Cavell's work, through his objects—which range from William Shakespeare to Samuel Beckett and pass through Hollywood comedies and melodrama, and opera—and, above all, through his style and method. (shrink)

L’article vise à comparer Reinach et Austin dans leur découverte des performatifs et d’un certain type d’acte langagier et social. Il y a des similarités évidentes entre les deux philosophes, mais aussi des différences importantes qui permettent de montrer les véritables enjeux de la théorie austinienne : non seulement une découverte de la dimension pragmatique du langage, mais une critique, inséparable de la théorie des performatifs, de la notion même d’état de choses et du représentationalisme. Cette critique permet de distinguer (...) la théorie d’Austin, qui est une théorie de la performance linguistique, d’une ontologie ou d’une théorie des objets sociaux.This study aims to a comparison between Reinach’s and Austin’s discovery of performative utterances and of a species of both linguistic and social acts. Reinach and Austin share obviously a common approach to the phenomenon of performatives utterances. But there are also some crucial differences between them are to be discovered, which may set in focus some of the actual stakes of Austin’s theory : not only the pragmatic approach to language but also a criticism of the very idea of state of affairs and of representationalism as such. This critique makes the difference between Austin’s theory of linguistic performance, and Reinach’s ontology, or theory, of social objects. (shrink)

Expérience, pragmatisme, transcendantalisme. The article returns, in order to reflect upon experimentation, to the transcendentalism of R. W. Emerson and H. D. Thoreau. The better-known pragmatist tradition has absorbed, or, as Stanley Cavell suggests, has repressed such authors. However, the central concepts proposed by Emerson - Self-Reliance, the common, the low - not only announce pragmatism, but suggest a use of practice and a redefinition of experimentation which, in their radicality, go beyond pragmatist inquiry. Self-confidence and ordinary life are instruments (...) to reflect upon radical democracy and to reformat the idea of experimentation, on the basis of concepts like confidence, importance, subjective constitution, and experimentation as an adventure of the self. (shrink)

This paper aims at elucidating the present strength of the social and political ideas one can draw from Wittgenstein’ later work, rooting in it his conception of the subjectivity of language and of the speakers’ authority and voice; of the I and the us. The article uses the concept of forms of life – understood, following Stanley Cavell and Veena Das, not only in the social sense but also in the natural sense, as life forms. – in order to rearticulate (...) the natural and conventional and to perceive, as Cavell puts it, “the mutual implication of the natural and the social” in the constitution of us – and in a renewed, ordinary conception of democracy. (shrink)

La pornographie est un sujet difficile. La difficulté est d’abord de trouver une posture qui ne soit pas bêtement moralisatrice, sans pour autant céder à la fascination du porno qui influence pas mal de positions libérales sur le sujet. Pas question pour nous de dénoncer le porno, au même titre que la violence, comme représentant une menace générale ou un danger pour..

La pornographie est un sujet difficile. La difficulté est d’abord de trouver une posture qui ne soit pas bêtement moralisatrice, sans pour autant céder à la fascination du porno qui influence pas mal de positions libérales sur le sujet. Pas question pour nous de dénoncer le porno, au même titre que la violence, comme représentant une menace générale ou un danger pour..

Pierre Hadot, vous êtes un grand spécialiste de la philosophie antique. Vous êtes, entre autres, auteur de Qu’est-ce que la philosophie antique1et vous venez de publier une édition du Manuel d’Épictète2. Mais vous avez aussi écrit, par exemple, sur Montaigne, Kierkegaard, Thoreau, Foucault, Wittgenstein...

SANDRA LAUGIER / MICHELA MARZANO. — Quel est, selon vous, le rôle de la pornographie dans l’initiation masculine à la sexualité ?DANIEL WELZER-LANG. — Quand, dans les conférences ou les cours, j’interroge les hommes pour savoir combien d’entre eux n’ont pas eu leur premier émoi sexuel devant une..

L’A. revient, dans le prolongement de son ouvrage L’anthropologie logique de Quine sur un élément souvent négligé de la thèse d’indétermination de la traduction, à savoir la reconstruction/identification des connecteurs logiques par l’assentiment et le dissentiment. Après avoir examiné diverses objections à l’utilisation par Quine des « fonctions de verdict » dans la traduction, l’A. en vient à la véritable motivation de Quine dans son recours à l’assentiment, qui émerge dans l’ouvrage méconnu The Roots of Reference. Quine revient, par cet (...) usage de l’assentiment, à la question de l’analyticité et à sa critique des « Deux dogmes », qu’il nuance, dans son oeuvre tardive, par la suggestion d’une analyticité non seulement naturalisée, mais socialisée. The A., following a path opened in her early work L’anthropologie logique de Quine discusses an often neglected subargument of the indeterminacy thesis, i.e. the reconstruction or identification of logical connectives through the recognition of assent and dissent. After envisioning several objections to Quine’s “verdict tables” in the process of radical transaltion, the A. comes to the actual motivation in Quine’s use of assent, which emerges in his underrated book The Roots of Reference. Quine, by his use of assent, returns to the matter of the nature of analyticity, and corrects in his later work his earlier critique of “Two Dogmas”, by suggesting the possibility of naturalized, and socialized, definition of analyticity. (shrink)

Un élément constant de la pensée de Stanley Cavell est sa façon de prendre au sérieux le cinéma, notamment hollywoodien, non comme objet philosophique, mais comme philosophie, comme ayant un contenu et un enseignement philosophique. Cavell, après un ouvrage général sur l’ontologie et l’expérience du cinéma,...

L’A. examine quelques raisons de la difficulté à délimiter un domaine français de la philosophie de l’esprit qui soit l’équivalent de la « philosophy of mind » : définir la « philosophie de l’esprit » aujourd’hui nécessiterait une réflexion préalable sur le statut de l’esprit, et sur les enjeux philosophiques et historiques de la constitution d’une « philosophy of mind », plutôt que l’acceptation non critique de théories du « mental ». L’A. tente de définir le domaine de la « (...) philosophy of mind » et son statut historique et théorique, en revenant aux origines de la philosophie analytique et de la définition de l’esprit (chez Frege et Wittgenstein) par la logique et l’usage du langage. (shrink)