Abstract

The dissertation consists of three separate but related papers. The papers investigate various ways in which questions of value bear on questions of intelligibility, and vice versa. The guiding idea is the Wittgensteinian insight, explored by Stanley Cavell, that our intelligibility, to ourselves and to others, and in particular our saying anything with our words, is a matter of making a point. In the first paper I offer a reading guided by this insight, of Wittgenstein's remarks on 'seeing aspects'. In the second and third papers I use this insight for criticizing Kant's ethics and Kant's aesthetics, respectively; and as a starting point for developing alternative conceptions of ethical discourse and of beauty. ;Each one of the three essays picks a certain moment of human expression and communication, and asks for the point of what we say in such a moment. I take what may be called, after Wittgenstein, 'a language-game', and I ask for the source and nature of the comprehensibility we earn for ourselves in playing the game---a comprehensibility that depends on the game's having a point. ;No less important than the answer I offer in each case to the question of the point of a particular language-game is the fact---which I try in each case to establish---of philosophy's neglect of that question. In the opening section of the third essay I try to say something more systematic about the nature, and about the significance, of this neglect