Richard Eldridge

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 on Michael Verhoeven’s film The Nasty Girl (1990). Though the very ideas of accomplished selfhood and interest in experience naturally prompt some suspicion in a commercialized, pluralistic society, our responses to some movies show that we continue to aspire to a life that embodies them

When we imagine, previsage, and remember, do we engage in activities through which our selfhood or personhood is expressed, developed, and understood? In contemporary philosophy, the answer to this question has almost always been "No." Sometimes the self is taken to be a complex biological thing. Generally it is then added that this biological thing engages in certain so-called mental activities. But then how these activities are engaged in is either to be explained physically or modeled in a computer program, so that selfhood is not expressed and understood through these activities, but simply instanced in them. Or sometimes the self is thought, as in Sartre's existentialism, to be completely unconditioned, able to make itself into anything as a result of utterly arbitrary choice. Or sometimes it is thought to be epiphenomenal or fictive--not either a physical or introspectible something, so not a something at all.

In this provocative new study, Richard Eldridge presents a highly original and compelling account of Wittgenstein's _Philosophical Investigations_, one of the most enduring yet enigmatic works of the twentieth century. He does so by reading the text as a dramatization of what is perhaps life's central motivating struggle—the inescapable human need to pursue an ideal of expressive freedom within the difficult terms set by culture. Eldridge sees Wittgenstein as a Romantic protagonist, engaged in an ongoing internal dialogue over the nature of intentional consciousness, ranging over ethics, aesthetics, and philosophy of mind. The picture of the human mind that emerges through this dialogue unsettles behaviorism, cognitivism, and all other scientifically oriented orthodoxies. Leading a human life becomes a creative act, akin to writing a poem, of continuously seeking to overcome both complacency and skepticism. Eldridge's careful reconstruction of the central motive of Wittgenstein's work will influence all subsequent scholarship on it.

Recent revisionists about Frege have suggested that, contrary to Dummett's monumental work, Frege is to be understood as primarily an epistemologist, not a theorist of meaning. Currie's book is a valuable contribution to this new way of looking at Frege. Where Sluga, for example, focuses on the historical context of Frege's work and other writers are concerned with special topics such as naming and proof theory, Currie surveys the whole of Frege's career, highlighting his fundamental interest in the nature of mathematical knowledge.

Contemporary Philosophy in Focus offers a series of introductory volumes on many of the dominant philosophical thinkers of the current age. Stanley Cavell has been one of the most creative and independent of contemporary philosophical voices. At the core of his thought is the view that skepticism is not a theoretical position to be refuted by philosophical theory but is a reflection of the fundamental limits of human knowledge of the self, of others and of the external world that must be accepted. This volume is the first attempt systematically and accessibly to describe and assess the full range of Cavell's work. There are new accounts of Cavell's contribution to the philosophy of mind and language, the theory of action, ethics, aesthetics, Romanticism, American philosophy, Shakespeare, and film and opera. Outside philosophy the appeal of this volume will be unusually broad.