Stanley Cavell - February 2003

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.

Resumen El presente trabajo comenta la teoría poética de Walter Benjamin. Se hace notar que Benjamin sigue a Hölderlin al considerar que un verdadero poema es una configuración particular en la que se juntan los órdenes intelectual y perceptivo. Un verdadero poema aspiraría no a la verdad como correspondencia con un objeto determinado, sino a algo que en el texto se describe como “verdad enfática”. Palabras clave: Walter Benjamin, Hölderlin, verdad empática, crítica literaria Abstract Benjamin’s poetic theory is commented. It is noted that Benjamin follows Hölderlin in regarding a successful poem as a particular configuration that joins the intellectual and perceptual orders. Such a successful poem aims at and can possess not truth as correspondence to a given object, but rather what in the text is described as “emphatic truth”. Keywords: Walter Benjamin, Hölderlin, emphatic truth, literary criticism

Wittgenstein had significant religious impulses, from his early Notebooks to his late entries in Culture and Value. Christian religious texts seemed to him to articulate significant human experiences that were worthy of respect. Yet he found himself consistently unable to commit himself to any organized institutional religious life. This essay investigates the reasons (as opposed to psychological peculiarities with causal force) that might lie behind Wittgenstein’s stance. Friedrich Schiller describes modern social induce unsatisfiable longings for meaningful life. Northrop Frye describes the rhetorical form of the Christian Bible has having an indispensable role in orienting us toward reconciled life, but in the end more imaginatively than in effective worldly practice. Against this background, Wittgenstein’s combination of passionate attraction to Christianity with an inability to accept it emerges as itself an exemplary expression of the human.

Exactly how radical change in commitments on matters of fundamental concern is possible has been a problem since at least Paul's conversion on the road to Damascus and Augustine's rejection of Pelagianism and defence of divine grace. If an act of will is required to accept the offer of grace, then isn’t something important left to us to do? And if so, can or does reason play any role in such radical change? If so, how? Martin Warner takes on these large questions in The Aesthetics of Argument. One modest way in which he gets his account started is to note, following Susan Haack, that ‘the intuition … that there is such a thing as favourable but not conclusive evidence … is stronger than … [the intuition] that there is such a thing as “inductive implication”’ (p. 277, n.1). That is, we apparently do make...

A book review of Lydia Goehr, Red Sea – Red Square – Red Thread: A Philosophical Detective Story. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022, xlii + 677 pp. ISBN 9780197572443.