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    Cavell and the American Jeremiad
    Journal of Philosophical Research 39 377-391. 2014.
    Building on remarks by Dewey, Brandom, and Wittgenstein among others, this paper characterizes and defends a general style of philosophy as elucidatory analysis of concepts in circulation within a culture. The presence of this general style is then traced briefly in Quine and Beardsley. I then raise the question whether there is anything distinctively American about this general style. Drawing on work by Sacvan Bercovitch, I argue that use of this style is motivated by America’s distinctive reli…Read more
  •  38
    Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language (review)
    Review of Metaphysics 37 (4): 859-861. 1984.
    Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language is very much a work on Wittgenstein's epistemology, not on his philosophy of mind. Kripke focuses on Wittgenstein's account, principally set out in sections 1-242 of Philosophical Investigations, of our grasp of concepts and our ability to apply them; he discusses Wittgenstein's views about such topics as imagination, sensations, and consciousness only in passing as they bear on the former topic.
  •  56
    How Movies Think: Cavell on Film as a Medium of Art
    Estetika: The European Journal of Aesthetics 51 (1): 3-20. 2014.
    Stanley Cavell’s writing about movies, from the more theoretical and general The World Viewed (1971) to the later works on specific genres (Pursuits of Happiness, Contesting Tears), has a unifying theme: some movies as (successful) art investigate conditions of accomplished selfhood and interest in experience in medium-specific ways. This claim is explained and defended by explicating the details of the medium-specificity of the moving photographic image (and its history of uses) and by focusing…Read more