Abstract

The dissertation consists of three essays titled respectively: "The Citizen as The Legislator: The Conversation of Constitution in Rousseau's The Social Contract," "On Speaking and Sharing Language: The Grounds of Intelligibility in Stephen Mulhall's Stanley Cavell," "Paths to the Other: Reading as Philosophy and as Therapy in Freud's "Delusions and Dreams in Jensen's Gradiva"." ;Beyond an overarching concern with the conditions of mutual intelligibility, with developing accounts of different kinds of efforts which are required in order to arrive at mutual intelligibility, and with understanding the nature of various impediments to mutual intelligibility, central themes and concepts developed within the dissertation include: the nature and origin of society; Rousseau's general will; law and the introduction of law into human existence; the loss of the humanity of the human; attaining humanity and freedom; aspirations for human transformation and producing this aspiration in others; moral education; relationships between moral philosophy, political philosophy, and aesthetics; conformity: human enchainment and fixation; pessimism; citizenship and universal legislation; the self; self-expression, autobiography, and their significance for political and moral life; the self as representative; the self as beyond and unknown to itself; making the self intelligible to itself; intelligibility and genius; Wittgensteinian criteria; judgment and the intelligibility of judgment; the ways in which efforts to insure intelligibility undermine intelligibility; agreement in language and agreement in judgement; overcoming a desire for mastery; transformative reading and writing; philosophy and analytic therapy