Victor J. Krebs

McLuhan’s _The Medium Is the Message_ announced a new task for philosophers: gauging the manner and extent to which technological changes transform our basic _faculties of (collective) experience_ (rational thinking, feeling, intuiting, empathizing, imagining). The more traditionally repressed of these basic capacities in philosophical discourse are nevertheless the ones most directly affected by newly emerging media. After 2500 years of exploring reason in the West, it may be time for a deeper exploration into the spontaneous _vitality_,“the submerged iceberg beyond the mere tip that is reason,” as Ortega y Gasset argues. Ethical questions are not anymore about what is right or good but about the need to transform and overcome our resistance to finitude and mortality by learning to see the concrete circumstances of our words, actions, and feelings as conditions for things’ standing in the world.

We present here excerpts from seminars, interviews, and conversations with Stanley Cavell during the time of his visit to Caracas in 1998, collectively known as the ‘Caracas Seminar’. This material comprises Cavell’s responses to questions raised at the seminar, extracts from an interview with Maria Elena Ramos and Victor Krebs, and a subsequent letter they received from Cavell in response to further questions. Krebs’ introduction to the collection sets the scene for Cavell’s visit and sketches some reasons for the relevance of Cavell’s philosophy to Latin America and the nature of its reception there.

This article examines Armando Robles Godoy’s 1969 Peruvian film La muralla verde (The Green Wall) through the philosophical lens of Stanley Cavell, particularly his concepts of scepticism, acknowledgement, and moral perfectionism. The film’s depiction of a family seeking renewal in the jungle, only to be devastated by tragedy, stages an encounter with the limits of human mastery over nature, the fragility of social bonds, and the inevitability of grief. Rather than offering nostalgia for a lost harmony or a straightforward political denunciation, The Green Wall invites a sustained engagement with the ethical demands of acknowledgement—of others, of the environment, and of the limits of one’s own knowledge. Read against the background of Latin America’s colonial legacy, Cavell’s Emersonian call to the ordinary provides a counterpoint to the region’s inherited scepticism and its persistent ‘cultural melancholy’, marked by the tension between cosmopolitan ideals and autochthonous realities. In this light, Robles Godoy’s film can be seen not only as a reflection of Perú’s fractured history but also as an instance of cinema’s philosophical power: its capacity to reawaken democratic hope and ecological awareness, and to enact what Cavell describes as an ‘education for grown-ups’—a conversion grounded in mourning, finitude, and the possibilities of moral responsiveness.

Our understanding of the face is deeply entrenched in ocular-centrism and anthropocentric narcissism, limiting the recognition of faceness to humans alone. This restricted perspective undermines our ethical engagement with the non-human world and sustains an illusion of stability and control, blinding us to our existential fragility and diminishing our ability to address the profound challenges of the Anthropocene. Drawing on speculative realism, this essay seeks to transcend these limitations by reimagining the concept of the face as a dynamic, relational phenomenon. By broadening our discernment of faceness beyond the human, we aim to foster a more attuned and ethically responsive orientation toward the interconnected realities of our era.

O objetivo desta publicação é incentivar a produção filosófica de excelência por parte de pesquisadores notadamente influenciados pela filosofia de Wittgenstein e cujos temas possam suscitar um debate aprofundado. Além de desafiar o empreendimento filosófico contemporâneo, os temas aqui apresentados abordam questões que muitas vezes estão além daquelas consideradas por Wittgenstein em seu tempo. O leitor encontrará neste volume questões relacionadas ao ceticismo semântico e epistêmico, ao relativismo ético, às leituras literárias de Wittgenstein, ao problema das outras mentes e percepção de aspectos, a intersubjetividade e o caráter contrassensual do Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, e, também, relacionadas ao Paradoxo de Moore.