Passionate Utterance and Moral Education

Journal of Philosophy of Education 43 (1):57-74 (2009)
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Abstract

This paper explores Stanley Cavell’s notion of ‘passionate utterance’, which acts as an extension of/departure from (we might read it as both) J. L. Austin’s theory of the performative. Cavell argues that Austin having made the revolutionary discovery that truth claims in language are bound up with how words perform, then gets bogged by convention when discussing what is done ‘by’ words. In failing to account for the less predictable, unconventional aspects of language, the latter therefore washes his hands of the expressive passionate aspects of speech. To ignore such aspects is to ignore an important moral dimension of language. Finally, I bring Cavell’s approach to bear on the epistemic criterion, which Michael Hand applies in his paper ‘Should We Teach Homosexuality as a Controversial Issue?’. I suggest that Hand’s approach, by failing to account for the linguistic dimension of truth and the expressive quality that accompanies this dimension, presents an overly narrow conception of moral education.

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References found in this work

How to do things with words.John L. Austin - 1962 - Oxford [Eng.]: Clarendon Press. Edited by Marina Sbisá & J. O. Urmson.
Philosophy the day after tomorrow.Stanley Cavell - 2005 - Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.
Philosophy the Day after Tomorrow.[author unknown] - 2006 - Tijdschrift Voor Filosofie 68 (2):400-401.

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