The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality, and Tragedy (Paperback)

~ (Author) "If not at the beginning of Wittgenstein's later philosophy, since what starts philosophy is no more to be known at the outset than how to..." (more)
Key Phrases: skeptical recital, pictured pot, concerning other minds, Tonio Kröger, The Avoidance of Love, Must We Mean What We Say (more...)

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

"The Claim of Reason is one of the great adventures of 20th-century philosophy; not only an incomparable exploration of skepticism and the knowledge of others, but also an exemplary reading of an exemplary 20th-century philosopher, and one of the deepest meditations we have on philosophy and its history. There are countless things to learn from and engage with in this book, and I haven't been out of reach of it since it was first published twenty years ago. It remains an indispensable, inexhaustible philosophical text for our time."--Richard Moran, Harvard University

"The necessity for Cavell's book is more pressing than ever. Again and again, Cavell shows us how in philosophy we make mysteries of ourselves and others, and fail to see the genuine sources of mystery in our lives. He shows us the fate of reason in our philosophizing: how we have satisfied ourselves, or tried to, with an etiolated, moralized substitute for the real thing. Wittgenstein said that in the philosophical race the winner is the one who can run most slowly. This wonderful book slows our thinking in the way Wittgenstein had in mind. We are repeatedly surprised, stopped short, turned round--by a work that reconnects philosophy with the needs it promises to serve."--Cora Diamond, University of Virginia

"There are various reasons why a work of philosophy might be accorded the status of a classic. Some books manage to be always ahead of you, so that each time you come back to the work, after an interval during which you have grown philosophically, you discover that the author has already been there before you. Other books have the uncanny power to give voice to thoughts you took to be peculiarly yours, thus emboldening you to own them. While yet others are classics not only for all they say, but because of all they almost say--every page seems to nod at some powerful but untamed thought waiting to be befriended. Stanley Cavell's The Claim of Reason is a classic in all three of these ways at once."--James Conant, University of Chicago


"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

Product Description

This reissue of an American philosophical classic includes a new preface by Cavell, in which he discusses the work's reception and influence. The work fosters a fascinating relationship between philosophy and literature both by augmenting his philosophical discussions with examples from literature and by applying philosophical theories to literary texts. Cavell also succeeds in drawing some very important parallels between the British analytic tradition and the continental tradition, by comparing skepticism as understood in Descartes, Hume, and Kant with philosophy of language as practiced by Wittgenstein and Austin.

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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: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #344,906 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

33 of 33 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 (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

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.

14 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Can I ever know what he really thinks?, June 6, 2004

By A Customer

In an episode of a popular TV series, a female character tired of the obscurity in her relationship complains to her partner that, even though she can see his lips moving as he speaks, she can never know what he is really thinking. What is it that she is accusing him of, and is her complaint necessarily melodramatic? Stanley Cavell's long, difficult book on scepticisim and our knowledge of other people would be an excellent guide in considering this question and assessing its source in the dialogue as a philosophical text.

One answer might be that, to her mind, he is strenuously trying to hide something from her, with the result that the way he speaks draws her attention primarily to his efforts in stopping himself from saying what he would say spontaneously if it wasn't for the strain of attempted secrecy. Instead of simply attending to him as usual, without any interpretation, she finds herself inferring, from all kinds of bodily clues, that he is deliberately denying her access to his thoughts and feelings. If he wasn't trying to be so secretive and deceitful, she would see straightaway that his words were somehow aligned with his thoughts, and would have no reason to accuse him of wanting to mislead her. On this reading, there is nothing particularly melodramatic about the situation at hand - it is all just an ordinary anxiety about a lover's desire to avoid transparency.

But there might also be a second answer: she has lost all confidence in his words and actions ever revealing his thoughts. It isn't just that his face communicates something about him that she finds incompatible with what he is saying about his love for her; rather, it is that nothing he ever does could give her any reliable clues as to what goes on inside him: his mind and heart remain forever sealed off from her by his body. No matter what he says or does, none of these things ever express what she really wants to know - he is closed in on himself, inaccessible to her precisely where she would want most intimacy with him. Now this is an evidently melodramatic reading: it goes beyond the situation as described and precludes any chance of success for the lovers - it is not because of anything he does deliberately that he is hidden from her, it is just how human beings are doomed to relate to each other in mutual ignorance. But is it a real worry for anyone?

Stanley Cavell's book falls into four interconnected parts. The first part discusses the notion of a criterion - what is involved in saying that a given thing is called this or that, and how that sort of claim differs from saying that it is a real specimen of a particular kind. Cavell's guide here is the Wittgenstein of the Philosophical Investigations, and it is worth noting here how one person's thinking and writing can be an inexhaustible source of wonder and inspiration for another without turning them into a mere epigone. The second part concerns the idea that our fundamental relation to the world is one of knowledge - a view that holds a deep fascination for the philosopher but is nevertheless questioned as untrue to how human beings relate to things in the world. The third part concentrates on the place of rules in morality, whereas the fourth is a collection of essays, with rather unclear boundaries, on the temptation to think that our fellow human beings are not really human. A self-reflective book easy to get lost in - in more than one way.

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

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

By A Customer

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)