The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality, and Tragedy [Paperback]

Stanley Cavell (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 019513107X | ISBN-13: 978-0195131079 | Publication Date: July 1, 1999 | Edition: Trade

This handsome new edition of Stanley Cavell's landmark text, first published 20 years ago, provides a new preface that discusses the reception and influence of his work, which occupies a unique niche between philosophy and literary studies.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"An altogether remarkable work of American philosophy...that occupies the buffer zone between poetry and philosophy in a unique--and perhaps uniquely American way."--Critical Inquiry

"An intensely personal and uniquely provocative book. Stanley Cavell is a philosophical original."--Review of Metaphysics

About the Author

Stanley Cavell is at Harvard University.

Product Details

• Paperback: 544 pages
• Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA; Trade edition (July 1, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 019513107X
• ISBN-13: 978-0195131079
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.1 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.7 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #219,035 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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38 of 38 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Living our skepticism, December 12, 2003

By 

N. Dorward "obsessive reviewer" (Toronto, ON Canada) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality, and Tragedy (Paperback)

The entirety of Cavell's work arranges itself around _The Claim of Reason_, a 564pp book that was extraordinarily long in its gestation (over two decades), as it grew out of his thesis on Wittgenstein into a much stranger shape. In Cavell's inimitable self-citing way, since its publication he's rarely written anything that doesn't refer back to _The Claim of Reason_.

I'm not going to summarize it here. Its basic burden ("burden" is a word Cavell likes to use--think of it in both senses, as both "weight" & "refrain") is an effort to grapple with the Western epistemological tradition, & to suggest that it contains a major blind spot. Post-Cartesian philosophy has been preoccupied with skepticism about the possibility of proving the accuracy of our knowledge about or, or even the existence of, the material world. Cavell is interested in this skepticism for two reasons: (1) its ultimate unanswerability; (2) the curious evanescence of its conclusions: as Hume notes, once one leaves the study & goes out into the real world of social interaction & daily concerns, the skeptical conclusion evaporates, looks "cold & strained". Cavell then traces out another kind of skepticism: the problem of the existence of other minds, or more generally the question of our knowledge of others. In Cavell's view, other-minds skepticism "makes sense" in a way that material-world skepticism does not: or rather, it is "live" in our everyday interactions (it's not news to anyone that we have only glimpses of the inner being of others). In other words, with the problem of other minds, "we live our skepticism" (the four-word formula which the entire book builds up to).

This is a neat opposition which Cavell admits is itself somewhat unstable. But it leads him to suggest that the history of Western & in particular post-Cartesian philosophy has been a history of ignoring the problem of the other; for Cavell it is a concern that has been instead most deeply grappled with in literature. The book concludes with a sketch of four of what he takes to be the most fruitful ways philosophy could develop a history of the problem of the other; & with readings of _The Merchant of Venice_, _The Winter's Tale_ & (in particular) _Othello_ as dramas of other-minds skepticism.

As you'll see I've approached the book, so to speak, from the back-end: it takes quite some time before these larger themes are fully set forth. The opening sections take on several different thinkers (Rawls, Austin) but are largely an exposition of Cavell's reading of Wittgenstein's _Philosophical Investigations_. The key move here is his case that Wittgenstein's notion of "criteria" has been misunderstood by most of Wittgenstein's readers: Cavell (to my mind persuasively) argues that Wittgenstein did not conceive of criteria as criteria for (proof of) something's _existence_; but that instead they are criteria of _meaning_: of what makes something "count as", identifiable as something.

This is the kind of book which is, simply, too full for any single reading: it's as much a sourcebook as it is a sustained argument, & I can see why Cavell continues to use it as such. There are elements I wish he had extended further. For instance, I find myself desiring that Cavell had taken time to spell out, not just the distinction/interrelation between material-world skepticism & other-minds skepticism, but also between material-world skepticism & scientific knowledge & practice, as forms of thinking that both contradict what we "know" about the world in everyday life. (What I'm getting at is: in the "skeptical recital", as Cavell puts it, the exchange runs something like: "How do you know this envelope on this table exists?" "By means of my senses." Then: "But could you not be deceived by a clever trickster? "Couldn't you be hallucinating or dreaming?" or "But you can't see the _other_ side of the envelope." &c. But what if instead the speaker pointed out the disparity between the data give by the senses, & the way that the world is conceived of in the modern atomic theory for instance? What distinguishes this kind of cognitive dissonance from skepticism?) This is not a criticism, exactly--obvious Cavell has different fish to fry--but it seems an odd omission given the book's interest in Romanticism, which on my understanding is in part a response to science's disenchantment of the world (Keats complaining about optical science's ruining the charm of the rainbow, &c). Cavell's discussion of our disappointment with knowledge would have been richer, I think, if it had touched on this other area.

A last word on the style of the book, which I might describe as "companionable". The book is not without its miry spots, but on the whole it's an enjoyable, rather friendly read, with a lot of interesting eddies of internal dialogue (like Wittgenstein, Cavell likes to introduce imaginary interlocutors). The more tortuous (Henry) Jamesian style of later Cavell is only rarely in evidence, perhaps because so much of the book derives from his early dissertation (though obviously extensively reworked). For all the sheer unruliness of the book's structure, it's the kind of book that stays with you, a touchstone & resource.

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Cavell's Opus, June 6, 2001

By A Customer

This review is from: The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality, and Tragedy (Paperback)

Despite "long sentences," this book is an essential and personal Auseinandersetzung with philosophical issues ranging from Skepticism (of the world, of other minds), rule-following, common-sense knowledge, ordinary language philosophy, essentialism, foundationalism and much more. Cavell articulates a very particular and unorthodox interpretation of Wittgenstein, making use of his methodology, his examples and characterizations of ordinary, everyday problems by taking his 'philosophical intentions' to be essentially 'therapuetic' as opposed to 'constructive.' This is something Cavell has in common with both McDowell and Rorty though his hopes and desires for philosophy go beyond a simple critique of culture and beyond 'vocabulary changes' (Rorty) to include positive attempts to embody a philosophy that can live with the age old problems (of skepticism, the mind-body problem) that has plagued it for thousands of years. Though there are no end-all solutions to these problems, he believes, there is also no way to avoid grappling with them. The Claim of Reason is an attempt to embody and exemplify this belief by confronting traditional epistemology as well as the Wittgensteinian and Austinian methods of coming to terms with it. (Other reading sympathetic to this line of thought can be found in 'the new wittgenstein' eds. Alice Crary & Rupert Read)

10 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars The belles lettres tradition at its best, August 10, 2002

By A Customer

This review is from: The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality, and Tragedy (Paperback)

I recommend this book to anyone who, like me, is in love with ideas but cannot figure out why anyone would bother to read the dry, technical, specialized prose of contemporary Anglo-American philosophy OR the windy, pseudo-profound, obscurantist convolutions of European postmodernism. I came to this book from Cavell's brilliant volume on screwball comedy, "Pursuits of Happiness," which treated Golden Age American cinema with the
intellectual and aesthetic seriousness it deserves without ever
straying from an essential love of the films. "The Claim of Reason" was a difficult read (I was 20 when I read it and had never read an entire book of philosophy): Cavell can be windy and obscurantist himself, yet there is also something beguilingly sensual about his prose (a little like Henry James), and even when one is not the least bit sure that one fully understands him, one is inexorably led on because the book, unlike any other modern philosophy I am aware of, treats philosophical problems as though they have meaning for the deepest concerns of one's daily life, and vice versa. Cavell also, throughout his writings, treats morality as being of urgent concern, without ever relying on platitudes...