Dear all, This term, Paolo Babbiotti and I will be running a reading group on Stanley Cavell's The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality, and Tragedy. We will meet starting Week 2, and convene subsequently on a weekly basis from 5-6 pm in the Graduate Common Room.
The aim of this reading group is to provide an occasion to encounter and engage with the American philosopher Stanley Cavell's magnum opus The Claim of Reason. Cavell's work, which grows out the tradition of ordinary language philosophy, is marked by its intensely personal and at times highly idiosyncratic style as well as its exceptionally broad range—his work ranges over language, aesthetics, ethics, politics, cinema, and theatre, and draws freely on a diverse cast of philosophical influences that include, among others, Austin, Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Nietzsche, Emerson, Thoreau, and Freud. The central problematic of The Claim of Reason (and arguably of Cavell's entire philosophical career) is skepticism; by way of his incredibly rich, meandering discussions of language, politics, morality, and literature, Cavell traces and stakes in this work his unique understanding of skepticism as not so much a problem of epistemology but a problem "we live"—as a problem expressing certain (ethical, aesthetic, and political) difficulties that arise out of our existence with other people in the world. Below are two links to: 1. the reading list (which includes a brief introduction to Cavell and The Claim of Reason) https://www.dropbox.com/s/qbkyrqrt7r459lm/The%20Cavell%20Reading%20Group.docx?dl=0 ...and... 2. a pdf copy of The Claim to Reason https://www.dropbox.com/s/f2lmiricveocr7j/cavell%20the-claim-of-reason-wittgenstein-skepticism-morali.pdf?dl=0 Hope we can see some of you there! Best Yo and Paolo _____________________________________________________ To unsubscribe from the CamPhilEvents mailing list, or change your membership options, please visit the list information page: http://bit.ly/CamPhilEvents List archive: https://lists.cam.ac.uk/pipermail/phil-events/ Please note that CamPhilEvents doesn't accept email attachments. See the list information page for further details and suggested alternatives.
