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 ...

Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 55, Issue 1, Page 263-281, February 2021.

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)

This paper aims to bring together the appeal to the ordinary in the ethics of care and the ‘destruction’ or philosophical subversion which Wittgenstein references in his Philosophical Investigations: Where does our investigation get its importance from, since it seems to destroy everything interesting, all that is great and important? What we are destroying is nothing but houses of cards. The paper pursues a connection between the ethics of care and ordinary language philosophy as represented by Wittgenstein, Austin and Cavell, (...) in particular in a feminist perspective. The central point of Carol Gilligan’s In a Different Voice may not be the idea of a ‘feminine morality’ but a claim for an alternative form of morality. Gilligan’s essay seeks to capture a different, hitherto neglected yet universally present alternative ethical perspective, one easy to ignore because it relates to women and women’s activities. The ethics of care recalls a plea for ‘realism’; in the sense given to it in Cora Diamond’s The Realistic Spirit to mean the necessity of seeing what lies close at hand. Reflection on care brings ethics back to everyday practice much as Wittgenstein sought to bring language back from the metaphysical level to its everyday use. (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)

Résumé Les discussions contemporaines du concept fécond de forme de vie ont permis de mettre en évidence à quel point le concept de forme lui-même est essentiel chez Wittgenstein, structurant la continuité entre le premier et le second Wittgenstein. En passant de la « forme logique » au concept de forme de vie, Wittgenstein entend renoncer à une unité « de forme » pour passer à une « famille » de structures apparentées. Mais la logique ne disparaît pas – au (...) contraire. Le point sur lequel s’appuie sa recherche reste bien la forme, entendue désormais comme pluralité de façons pour le langage de décrire le réel. Il importe donc de comprendre le concept de forme (de vie), Lebensform, non seulement comme une alternative au concept de règle, mais comme expression d’une nouvelle entente de la forme. (shrink)

Que chez J. L. Austin le langage soit action n’est pas nouveau. Il est toutefois important de comprendre – et cela est plus radical – comment l’introduction de l’idée des actes de langage transforme non seulement la conception du langage, mais la conception de l’action et fragilise conjointement la signification, et l’action. Chez Austin, c’est le triplet « acte de langage »/« échec »/« excuse » qui est central – j’essaierai à partir de cette articulation de montrer en quel sens, (...) chez Austin, la dimension sociale est cruciale. Dans ce sens, ce travail, bien qu’il ne constitue pas une étude historique en ethnométhodologie, est sans doute guidé par l’idée de l’enquête sociologique héritée de Harold Garfinkel, où l’ordre social n’est pas une réalité indépendante, et où l’on cherche à élucider la fabrication constante de l’ordre social, tel qu’il est reconnaissable, intelligible, analysable et rapportable par les participants. (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)

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)

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)

My paper focuses on the theme of visibility by teasing out some paradoxes of invisibility. In the ordinary social world, what is said to be invisible is generally what is here, right before our eyes, but to which we pay no attention. Care is invisible because it goes on without us seeing it. By suddenly making visible what is ordinarily invisible, the COVID pandemic has been a strange pedagogical moment, making visible the people who take care of “us”, and revealing (...) our entire society’s ignorance of what allows it to live—whether in the context of everyday life or in the urgency of the risk of death. The grammar of care has thus imposed itself on everyone, because care is never so visible as in those situations where a form of life is shaken. Care work has been revealed as invisible work that keeps everyone going. “Invisible” does not refer to a difficulty in perceiving but rather a refusal to see. A refusal to see something that is not hidden, but which we do not see precisely because it is right before our eyes. Invisibility is thus denial, in both the social and the theoretical realms, especially when care work is envisioned in the terms of the further invisibilization of care work when it is done for the benefit of women as in the “care drain” from poor to rich countries. The asymmetry in the relations between North and South is part of the invisibility of what sustains societies. The invisible chains of care reveal the extent to which the question of service is the fundamental question of social invisibility. (shrink)

For Stanley Cavell, the specific and contemporary theme of the ordinary sets off from America and the transcendentalism of Emerson and Thoreau, in order to reinvent itself in Europe with ordinary language philosophy – Wittgenstein and Austin. But in order to understand this, it is necessary to perceive what Cavell calls, inspired by Wittgenstein and Thoreau, “the uncanniness of the ordinary,” inherent to its anthropological thematization. In his preface to the recent work of Veena Das, Life a...

English summary: Through the concept of the ordinary, and what is ordinary, the present volume explores contemporary American philosophy. More specifically, the author presents Stanley Cavells role at the center of this movement to examine its innovative approach to philosophy, one that draws on what we have at hand, but also seeks to discover and invent. French description: Savons-nous vraiment ce qu'est l'ordinaire, ce qui nous est ordinaire? Penser la philosophie americaine, et le role qu'a son coeur joue Stanley Cavell, (...) signifie poser de nouveau ces questions, afin de mettre en evidence une nouvelle voix ou tradition contemporaine qui, a partir du langage ordinaire, parvient a redonner de la vie a des enjeux philosophiques devenus trop conformistes ou etroits, et a rearticuler les questions de langage (ordinaire) au moral et a l'esthetique, comme au politique. A la fois objet de rejet et de fascination, l'ordinaire est comme l'autre de la philosophie, ce qu'elle veut, dans son arrogance, depasser, mais aussi ce vers quoi elle aspire, nostalgiquement, a retourner. Penser la philosophie americaine signifie repenser l'ordinaire en dehors de ces deux tendances: recommencer la philosophie, non pas a zero, mais avec ce qu'on a sous la main, sous les yeux, et qui reste a decouvrir, ou a inventer. (shrink)

This article aims at putting in context and at pursuing the concept elaborated by the later Putnam of an ethics without ontology, which I associate with certain other contemporary philosophers like Stanley Cavell and Cora Diamond; and in general of a philosophy without ontology. Putnam’s ambition is to get rid of ontology by refocusing reflection on ethics in a realistic spirit. This calls for a reappraisal of the entirety of Putnam’s evolution after the 1980s, especially his “Wittgensteinian turn,” which has (...) sometimes been underappreciated. To say that ethics has nothing to do with ontology is to make a claim not only about ethics, but also about realism. That is why Putnam’s later work matters today, especially his radical break with the fact/value distinction. This does not only concern ethics, for as Diamond has said and as Putnam reiterates in his own style and culture, we must refocus reflection on ethics and on the place of ethics in our forms of life and of language. (shrink)

Wittgenstein est un philosophe du langage, de l'esprit, et en particulier un philosophe de la subjectivite; pas seulement de la grammaire de la premiere personne, ou de la logique du scepticisme, mais de la subjectivite comme exprimee dans le langage, comme articulation du dedans et du dehors: comme voix humaine. Le mythe de l'interiorite se revele, dans cette approche, comme un mythe de l'inexpressivite: on prefere un prive inaccessible, muet, a la realite (corporelle) et a la fatalite du vouloir-dire. C'est (...) bien le realisme ( la chose la plus difficile, dit Wittgenstein) qu'on decouvre alors au bout du scepticisme. (shrink)

On considère souvent, à la suite des ouvrages classiques de J. Bouveresse, que Wittgenstein veut opérer un rejet ou une critique de la subjectivité. Il semble cependant que les derniers textes de Wittgenstein consacrés à la philosophie de la psychologie permettent de modifier partiellement ce point de vue, et défaire place à une conception spécifique de la subjectivité, redéfinissant un sujet dépsychologisé voire désubjectivé, qui n'est plus le point sans étendue du Tractatus, ni le sujet métaphysique, ni le sujet de (...) la psychologie, mais simplement une voix ordinaire. Wittgenstein's later work is often held by critics in France, following e.g. Jacques Bouveresse's insights, to be operating a criticism of both interiority and subjectivity. A reading of Wittgenstein's later writings on the philosophy of psychology might somehow change such a point of view, and redefine a specific view — as a de-psychologized species — of subjectivity in Wittgenstein's writing, thus redefining the wittgensteinian subject in terms of an ordinary voice. (shrink)

Nous proposons dans ce volume une approche pluridisciplinaire du sens commun. Fruit d'un travail collectif organisé au CURAPP et dans le cadre du programme scientifique ASC, les articles ici présentés, par la diversité de leurs orientations théoriques et disciplinaires, contribuent à faire un état des lieux de la question. L'idée de sens commun est fréquemment utilisée et citée en sociologie, philosophie, linguistique, psychologie, sans qu'il en soit toujours proposé de définition ou d'analyse critique. Elle demandait un travail de définition et (...) de requalification historique et théorique, et de mise en rapport à des corrélats : la norme, le sens moral, le sens social, le sens critique. L'ouvrage vise donc la description, aussi précise que possible des formes et des normes du sens commun en tant qu'elles enveloppent des dimensions cognitives, perceptives, linguistiques, sociales et morales. Il apparaît vite que cette notion résiste à la simple analyse et que seule la superposition de différents points de vue permet d'en percevoir quelques contours. On ne sera pas étonné de la diversité des figures convoquées et de la variété des objets à partir desquels elle est manifestée et interprétée. L'intérêt du sens commun comme objet d'investigation philosophique est alors d'apparaître comme ce qui permet de reprendre de manière oblique certains questionnements classiques qu'il déplace. Ainsi de la question topique des formes affectives, linguistiques et sociales d'expression du sentiment, de l'ancrage de la moralité dans une nature humaine et dans une sensibilité partagée ou encore de la manière dont le sens commun permet de réinterpréter, dans l'histoire des sciences sociales, la question des liens entre action et critique. (shrink)

New words have found their way into the public sphere: we now commonly talk about “confinement”, “barrier-gesture” or “distancing”. The very idea of public space has been transformed: with restrictions on movement and interaction in public; with the reintegration of lives (certain lives) into the home (if there is one) and private space; with the publicization of private space through internet relationships; with the cities’ space occupied, during confinement, by so-called “essential” workers; with the restriction of gatherings and political demonstrations (...) in public space. With these and other recent changes, it is imperative to revisit the concept of public space, which continues to be used as if it were self-evident, despite its profound transformation over the past few decades, in a process of realization and “literalization”. No longer just a comfortable metaphor for reasonable debates, public space has become a concrete reality in the 21th century. This transformation in the various phenomena, such as the occupation of squares and public spaces; the demand for spaces of conversation and expression for those without a voice; the transition of private matters into the public realm through verbal expression; and the expression and circulation of public issues within popular cultures. As a result, the question of public space is increasingly intertwined with that of private spaces, such as the home or individual subjectivities, forming an internal, logical relationship. (shrink)

J.L. Austin’s insight that language should be treated as a domain of human action, rather than merely as a tool for the transmission of information, has been enormously influential. His analysis of speech acts continues to be widely utilised in a vast number of fields, from the philosophy of language to social and political philosophy, the philosophy of law, gender and literary studies, as well as a variety of social sciences. Yet scholars have so far focused on performative utterances and (...) illocutionary acts, while the perlocutionary dimension of speech has generally been dismissed as unessential. This special issue, drawing inspiration from Stanley Cavell’s seminal work on passionate utterance, aims to shed new light on the philosophical, moral and political relevance of the perlocutionary. (shrink)

It may be time to question analytic philosophy’s structural ignorance of the methods of ordinary language philosophy. Cavell’s Must We Mean What We Say? upsets the analytic tradition to this end, pursuing a “linguistic phenomenology” that focuses on ordinary language use as a resource for describing the world. Cavell thereby entrusts the tradition with a more ambitious and concrete philosophical task.

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)

La série For all Mankind, forte de quatre saisons (2019-2024), est une uchronie : qu’aurait-il pu se passer si les Russes avait posé les pieds sur la Lune avant les Américains en 1969? Elle nous plonge dans un univers d’hommes, celui de la NASA, patriarcal, mais contraint d’évoluer vers une plus grande diversité. Cet univers semble le monde d’hier, celui de la conquête et de la survie du plus fort dans l’espace ou ailleurs. Il a quelque chose de l’ordre de (...) la dystopie, et pourtant il cultive un espoir presque utopique de construction d’un nouveau monde. (shrink)

L’A. présente la pertinence anthropologique de la thèse d’indétermination de la traduction de Quine, en suggérant qu’elle joue contre le relativisme, mais aussi contre une certaine forme d’universalisme : c’est ce que montre une analyse de la notion de prélogicité, critiquée par Quine qui invente à cette occasion le « principe de charité ». L’examen des usages et de la portée d’un tel principe, et sa confrontation aux thèses de Lévy-Bruhl, permet, au-delà de Quine, de repenser l’invocation devenue trop courante (...) et indéterminée d’une anthropologie en philosophie. (shrink)

L’A. examine le débat actuel sur la règle – notamment tel qu’il a été lancé par S. Kripke – et tente de le déplacer : la question n’est pas de fonder, penser ou expliquer la règle, ni de discuter des conceptions de la règle ou des applications correctes et incorrectes de la règle, mais de la « chercher au bon endroit », pour reprendre une expression de Cora Diamond. Il ne faut pas surestimer la place de la règle chez Wittgenstein (...) : toutes nos activités ne sont pas gouvernées par des règles, mais « suivre une règle » fait partie de nos pratiques et de leur arrière-plan. (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..

In this paper, I confront various conceptions of meaning and articulate them to anthropological styles of thought: W.V. Quine’s thesis of the indeterminacy of translation, Wittgenstein’s conception of meaning as use, Cavell’s philosophy of ordinary language, of ‘what we say’; Barbara Cassin’s Dictionary of Untranslatables where I approached English terms as inherently untranslatable; attention to details and to human vulnerability through the ‘textures of the ordinary’ Veena Das teaches us to observe. All these approaches to meaning as agency, vs. meaning (...) as a determined entity shared and expressed by different languages, lead to renew our concept of the global. (shrink)