Abstract

The field of my inquiry is the field of judgement. I focus primarily on the difficulties involved in the act of judging. What I emphasize, after Kant, is the absence of preexisting rules for judgement in its purest form. ;I interpret Cavell's discussion of Rawls' theory of justice as probing the implications of the fact that there will always be for the individual a judgement to be made of the distance between our own society and the ideal well ordered society. It is here I claim that the concept of the example comes into play. To elaborate this I show how Rousseau uses his experience of consent to the Republic of Geneva to provide an example, or a standard of judgement to the individual's seeking whether and how to express consent to their society. ;In my paper on the Kant's Third Critique I argue that what is most central in the judgement of taste is that it is the reflection and expression the individuality of the judge of taste and its function is to provoke one to rely on one's own sense of the world. It is primarily through the analysis of the relation of genius to taste that I elaborate the centrality of individuality but my claim is that this relation manifests itself also between the judge of taste and a community of taste. ;The concept of exemplarity leads me to the distinction between what can be said and what can be shown. In the paper on Wittgenstein's Tractatus I want to combat what I take to be a false understanding of the distinction between showing and saying which makes what is shown to be some property of the world that cannot be stated in language. I explain what Wittgenstein means by the notion of form and how it is that form only shows itself through language. I further see the overall design of the text as an exemplary reworking of Wittgenstein's philosophical experience. I thus interpret the idea of throwing away the ladder as a claim that the propositions of the book are of use only as an example to provoke one to thoughts of one's own