I present the features of the ordinary use of 'knows' that make a compelling case for the contextualist account of that verb, and I outline and defend the methodology that takes us from the data to a contextualist conclusion. Along the way, the superiority of contextualism over subject-sensitive invariantism is defended, and, in the final section, I answer some objections to contextualism.

"Cover " -- "Title Page " -- "Copyright " -- "Dedication" -- "Contents" -- "Introduction: Moral Globalization and Its Discontents" -- "1. Jackson Heights, New York: Diversity Plaza" -- "2. Los Angeles: The Moral Operating Systems of Global Cities" -- "3. Rio de Janeiro: Order, Corruption, and Public Trust" -- "4. Bosnia: War and Reconciliation" -- "5. Myanmar: The Politics of Moral Narrative" -- "6. Fukushima: Resilience and the Unimaginable" -- "7. South Africa: After the Rainbow" -- "Conclusion: Human Rights, (...) Global Ethics, and the Ordinary Virtues" -- "Notes" -- "Acknowledgments. (shrink)

This article starts from the premise that the ordinary is the mystical. It does so by delving into the dynamic relationship between Spirituality and Public Theology against the backdrop of Christianity’s societal roles. It explores how Christian theology extends beyond private faith to address broad societal issues. Through a critical examination of Public Theology’s distinct contributions to contemporary discussions, the article emphasises the necessity of engaging Spirituality – with its focus on the divine-human relationship into this discourse.Contribution: This synthesis (...) aims to enrich our comprehension of Christianity’s impact on public life, advocating for a faith that actively contributes to societal transformation across diverse contexts. (shrink)

In this paper, I confront various conceptions of meaning and articulate them to anthropological styles of thought: W.V. Quine’s thesis of the indeterminacy of translation, Wittgenstein’s conception of meaning as use, Cavell’s philosophy of ordinary language, of ‘what we say’; Barbara Cassin’s Dictionary of Untranslatables where I approached English terms as inherently untranslatable; attention to details and to human vulnerability through the ‘textures of the ordinary’ Veena Das teaches us to observe. All these approaches to meaning as agency, (...) vs. meaning as a determined entity shared and expressed by different languages, lead to renew our concept of the global. (shrink)

One popular test for distinguishing linked and convergent argument structures is Robert Yanal's Ordinary Summing Test. Douglas Walton, in his comprehensive survey of possible candidates for the linked/convergent distinction, advocates a particular version of Yanal's test. In a recent article, Alexander Tyaglo proposes to generalize and verifY Yanal's algorithm for convergent arguments, the basis for Yanal's Ordinary Summing Test. In this paper I will argue that Yanal's ordinary summing equation does not demarcate convergence and so his (...) class='Hi'>Ordinary Summing Test fails. Hence, despite Walton's recommendation or Tyaglo's generalization, the Ordinary Summing Test should not be used for distinguishing linked argument structures from convergent argument structures. (shrink)

When it was first published in French in 1980, The Ordinary Man of Cinema signaled a shift from the French film criticism of the 1960s to a new breed of film philosophy that disregarded the semiotics and post-structuralism of the preceding decades. Schefer describes the schizophrenic subjectivity the cinema offers us: the film as a work projected without memory, viewed by (and thereby lived by) a subject scarred and shaped by memory. The Ordinary Man of Cinema delineates the (...) phenomenology of movie-going and the fleeting, impalpable zone in which an individuals personal memory confronts the cinemas ideological images to create a new way of thinking. It is also a book replete with mummies and vampires, tyrants and prostitutes, murderers and freaksfigures that are fundamental to Schefers conception of the cinema, because the worlds that cinema traverses (our worlds, interior and exterior) are worlds of pain, unconscious desire, decay, repressed violence, and the endless mystery of the body. Fear and pleasure breed monsters, and such are what Schefers emblematic "ordinary man" seeks and encounters when engaging in the disordering of the ordinary that the movie theater offers him. Among other things, Schefer considers "The Gods" in 31 brief essays on film stills and "The Criminal Life" with reflections on spectatorship and autobiography. While Schefers book has long been standard reading in French film scholarship, until now it has been something of a missing link to the field (and more broadly, French theory) in English. It is one of the building blocks of more widely known and read translations of Gilles Deleuze (who cited this book as an influence on his own cinema books) and Jacques Rancière. (shrink)

Consider people’s ordinary concept of belief. This concept seems to pick out a particular psychological state. Indeed, one natural view would be that the concept of belief works much like the concepts one finds in cognitive science – not quite as rigorous or precise, perhaps, but still the same basic type of notion. But now suppose we turn to other concepts that people ordinarily use to understand the mind. Suppose we consider the concept happiness. Or the concept love. How (...) are these concepts to be understood? One obvious hypothesis would be that they are best understood as being more or less like the concept of belief. Maybe these concepts, too, pick out a particular mental state and thereby enable people to predict, explain and understand others’ behavior. We will argue that this hypothesis is mistaken. Instead, we suggest that the different concepts people use to understand the mind are fundamentally different from each other. Some of these concepts do indeed serve simply to pick out a particular mental state, but others allow a role for evaluative judgments. So, for example, our claim will be that when people are wondering whether a given agent is truly ‘happy’ or ‘in love,’ they are not merely trying to figure out whether this agent has a particular sort of mental state. They are also concerned in a central way with evaluating the agent herself. In short, our aim is to point to a striking sort of difference between the different concepts that people use to pick out psychological attitudes. We will be.. (shrink)

To what extent was ordinary language philosophy a precursor to experimental philosophy? Since the conditions on pursuit of either project are at best unclear, and at worst protean, the general question is hard to address. I focus instead on particular cases, seeking to uncover some central aspects of J. L. Austin’s and John Cook Wilson’s ordinary language based approach to philosophical method. I make a start at addressing three questions. First, what distinguishes their approach from other more traditional (...) approaches? Second, is their approach a form of experimental philosophy? Third, given their aims, should it have been? I offer the following preliminary answers. First, their approach distinctively emphasizes attention to what we should say when. Second, their approach is closer to contemporary experimental mathematics than it is to some prominent forms of contemporary experimental philosophy. Third, some purported grounds for pursuing their aims by way of surveying what individual speakers would say when are not compelling. (shrink)

The noblest man living in a desert absorbs something of its harshness and sterility, while the nostalgia of the mountain-bred man when cut off from his surroundings is proof how deeply environment has become part of his being. Neither the savage nor the civilized man is what he is by native constitution but by the culture in which he participates.People wish to be settled; only as far as they are unsettled is there any hope for them.A prominent undercurrent in the (...) tradition of American philosophy concerns the endeavor to recover hope through a return to the ordinary and everyday. Ralph Waldo Emerson envisions and inaugurates such a path for the American scholar: I read with joy some of the auspicious signs of the... (shrink)

Weber’s concept of rationalization internally relies on an opposition that is borrowed from a religious semantics: the opposition between the extraordinary and the ordinary. Taking as point of departure the expression ‘the disenchantment of the world’ I argue that this expression, and the concept of rationalization, which is connected with it, have to be understood as elements of a categorical field of tension that is dominated precisely by the mentioned opposition. Referring to the sociology of religion, in which Weber (...) for the first time developed and deployed this opposition as an analytical tool, it appears that 1) the concept of rationalization in Weber is multivocal; 2) that the extraordinary and the ordinary relate to one another as do charisma and institution; and finally 3) that the description of the western rationalization process in terms of ‘disenchantment of the world’ by no means signifies that modern society is no longer characterized by the relationship between the extraordinary and the ordinary. Weber, for that matter, indeed attaches great importance to the extraordinary as a factor of revolutionary change, both in modern history and in modern politics. (shrink)

My proposed mechanism of reference fixing for ordinary natural kind terms in the book Roads to Reference appeals to the ordinary notion of substance. In this note I reply to an objection by Martín Abreu Zavaleta that that notion is too vague to allow for a sufficiently constrained property to become the referent of a given ordinary substance term. I argue that the notion of substance is far less vague than Abreu Zavaleta claims.

This article addresses the question of the relationship between corporeality and the ordinary in the works of François Laruelle. This is done through the formulation of the ‘ordinary body’ that draws from across Laruelle's work on the ordinary, corporeality and photography in order to outline Laruelle's radically immanent account of embodiment. The critical outline of Laruellean corporeality and the ordinary body is drawn out via a critical posing of Laruelle in contrast to Deleuze and Guattari. In (...) doing so, the article indicates the singular difference between Laruelle, on one side, and Deleuze and Guattari, on the other, with respect to corporeal immanence and the usage of the everyday and ordinary. The article concludes with an argument that the relationship between the body and the ordinary in Laruelle's thought implies a novel non-philosophical or non-standard ‘poetics’ and usage of the ordinary. (shrink)

The ordinary concept of race is important and poorly understood. The present article seeks to address this problem by providing a general answer to the question: What is the concept of race?

What is death? The question is of wide-ranging practical importance because we need to be able to distinguish the living from the dead in order to treat both appropriately; specifically, the permissibility of retrieving vital organs for transplantation depends upon the potential donor's ontological status. There is a well-established and influential biological definition of death as irreversible breakdown in the functioning of the organism as a whole, but it continues to elicit disquiet and rejoinders. The central claims of this paper (...) are that the best way to address the question as to what death is, is to attend closely to our ordinary concept of death; doing so reveals that, whilst our ordinary understanding accommodates the biological definition, it also includes the thought that, for someone who has died, there will never again be anything it is like to be that person. Support for these claims is provided, and their academic and practical implications traced. The important practical implication is that we are left in quandary as to whether certain potential organ donors — for example, anencephalic babies and the permanently vegetative — are dead, a quandary that has serious implications for the relevance of the dead donor rule in transplant ethics. (shrink)

Recently, a number of experimental philosophers have converged on the position that the ordinary concept of weakness of will does not solely consist in “judgment” or “intention” violation but is more like a cluster concept in which each factor plays contributory roles in the application of the concept. This, however, raises the question as to which factor is more central or plays a more significant role in folk’s understanding of the concept. I contend that the ordinary concept of (...) weakness of will is primarily constituted by the “executive commitment” rather than the “evaluative commitment” practices. Drawing on extensive evidence from developmental psychology, I will argue that the executive commitment, which, as I will show, involve intention recognition and metarepresentation, is developmentally prior and more fundamental in our exercise and intuitive understanding of the concept. (shrink)

The goal of this dissertation is to provide a critique of Jurgen Habermas's communication-theoretic proposal for a discourse ethics. In doing so, I confront the theory of communicative rationality with the pronounced intention of letting discourse ethics take, as Habermas puts it, its orientation for an intersubjective interpretation of the categorical imperative from Hegel's theory of recognition. My objections to this attempt to provide a critical theory with normative grounds generally relate to what I see as a too excessive formalism, (...) and a tendential repression of the dimension of ethical ontology. ;Although Habermas insists that agents always bring their lifewordly conditions of existence--their particular identities and histories--with them when they engage argumentatively to redeem validity claims, the discourse model has throughout its effective history been notoriously helpless when engaging with the internally related issues of motivation and the cognitive problems of judgment and context-sensitive application. In analyzing the principle of universalizability , I show why it is necessary to construct a dialectical relationship between morality and issues of the good life, and to introduce a notion of reflective judgment. Moreover, I argue for a detachment of moral theory from the quasi-transcendental grounding in formal structures of rationality. ;In the course of my successive interpretative confrontations with discourse ethics, I formulate a hermeneutic approach. One important upshot of this is that discourse ethics will be situated closer to Habermas's early suggestions towards a critical hermeneutics. This is a conception which emphatically promotes an internal link between judgment, action and argumentation. Another consequence relates to the need for a realist realignment of discourse ethics. I suggest that reflection and moral discourse, starting from the particularity of concrete cases but ultimately aiming towards universality , should be involved, not in a process of further disintegration of ethical life , but in a process of healing, in which universality serves a memorial, imaginative and communicative function: it creates a conceptual reservoir for interpreting our complex moral experiences, and ultimately for gaining knowledge of the self and its intricate bonds and attachments to others. (shrink)

It is widely thought that we have good reason to try to be important. Being important or doing significant things is supposed to add value to our lives. In particular, it is supposed to make our lives exceptionally meaningful. This essay develops an alternative view. After exploring what importance is and how it might relate to meaning in life, a series of cases are presented to validate the perspective that being important adds no meaning to our lives. The meaningful life (...) does need valuable projects, activities, and relationships. But no added meaning is secured by those projects, activities, and relationships being especially significant. The extraordinary life has no more meaning than the ordinary life. (shrink)

When we say that what two people feel for each other is 'true love,' we seem to be doing more than simply clarifying that it is in fact love they feel, as opposed to something else. That is, an experience or relationship might be a genuine or actual instance of love without necessarily being an instance of true love. But what criteria do people use to determine whether something counts as true love? This chapter explores three hypotheses. The first holds (...) that the ordinary concept of true love picks out love that is highly prototypical. The second, that it picks out love that is especially good or valuable. The third, that people distinguish between psychological states that are 'real' or not, and that it picks out love that is real. Two experiments provide evidence against the first hypothesis and in favor of the second and third. Implications for real-life disagreements about love are also discussed. (shrink)

If social, political, and material transformation is to have a lasting impact on individuals and society, it must be integrated within ordinary experience. Refiguring the Ordinary examines the ways in which individuals' bodies, habits, environments, and abilities function as horizons that underpin their understandings of the ordinary. These features of experience, according to Gail Weiss, are never neutral, but are always affected by gender, race, social class, ethnicity, nationality, and perceptions of bodily normality. While no two people (...) will experience the ordinary in exactly the same way, the multiplicities, possibilities, overlaps, and limitations of day-to-day horizons are always intersubjectively constituted. Weiss turns her attention to changing the conditions and experiences of oppression from ordinary to extraordinary. This book is an impressive phenomenological, feminist reading of the complexities of human experience.M. V. Marder, University of Toronto, Feb. 2009. (shrink)

Textures of the Ordinary shows how anthropology finds a companionship with philosophy in the exploration of everyday life. Based on two decades of ethnographic work among low-income urban families in India, Das shows how the notion of texture aligns ethnography with the anthropological tone in Wittgenstein and Cavell, as well as in literary texts. The book shows different routes of return to the everyday as it is corroded not only by catastrophic events but also by repetitive and routine violence (...) within everyday life itself. As an alternative to normative ethics, this book develops ordinary ethics as attentiveness to the other and as the ability of small acts of care to stand up to horrific violence. Textures of the Ordinary offers a model of thinking in which concepts and experience are shown to be mutually vulnerable. The book is an intellectually intimate invitation into the ordinary, that which is most simple yet most difficult to perceive in our lives. (shrink)

B a c k g r o u n d. The ordinary language philosophy should be considered as a set of different but interconnected research projects within the Anglo-American analytical philosophy of the first half and middle of the 20th century. A common factor for these studies is the application of the method of linguistic analysis of natural language expressions to solve many classical problems for philosophy. This method replaced the prevailing idealistic concepts, and was picked up and developed (...) in Great Britain by the works and scientific explorations of J. Moore and B. Russell. It is a generally accepted opinion that the sphere of interests of representatives of the ordinary language philosophy is divided between two poles, represented by the works of L. Wittgenstein and D. Austin. M e t h o d s. In the article, the author used the method of historical-philosophical reconstruction to clarify the role, place and genesis of the ordinary language philosophy as a dominant methodology within the Anglo-American analytical philosophy of the middle of the 20th century, general scientific methods of cognition: analysis, synthesis, generalization to clarify key ideas and concepts, which is the basis of the methodology of the ordinary language philosophy, as well as methods of systematization and comparison. R e s u l t s. The article clarifies the genesis of the main ideas and concepts of the philosophy of everyday language, as well as gives an example of the modern strategy of criticism of this methodological direction. The key postulates of the ordinary language philosophy age are clarified, namely: (i) the thesis that philosophical problems arise due to the incorrect use of language and must be solved by clarifying the meanings of words, (ii) philosophical analysis should not be based on the discovery of hidden logical forms of expression, and on the clarification of the necessary and sufficient conditions for the use of the expression, including the analysis of the situation of use, (iii) meaning as use, (iv) the philosophical analysis of the meaning should be carried out informally, taking into account the analysis of each specific case of the use of the expression, (v) criticism systematic theories of meaning. C o n c l u s i o n s. At the current stage of the development of analytical philosophy, there is a noticeable increase in attention to the achievements of the ordinary language philosophy. Among modern researchers and critics of this direction, the names of A. Baz, D. Nagel, S. Somes, and T. Williamson can be singled out. The presence of the interest of modern researchers indicates premature statements about the completion of the ordinary language philosophy. This concept should be rehabilitated, and its methodological apparatus should enrich the arsenal of scientific methods of modern analytical philosophers. (shrink)

Philip Kitcher and other secular naturalists assert that we have a problem-free concept of the "mundane physical world" and use the idea of our familiar material world to critique those who recognize a transcendent reality as in theism. It is argued that the naturalist's concept of the world faces problems involving the primacy of the mental, normativity, sensations and consciousness, and contemporary science. A closing section suggests, contra secular naturalism, that our experience of the mundane world can be suffused with (...) a sense of the transcendent, as we find in Tolstoy's Anna Karenina. This conclusion is supported by reference to other work. (shrink)

The desire for a meaningful life is ubiquitous, yet the ordinary concept of a meaningful life is poorly understood. Across six experiments (total N = 2,539), we investigated whether third-person attributions of meaning depend on the psychological states an agent experiences (feelings of interest, engagement, and fulfillment), or on the objective conditions of their life (e.g., their effects on others). Studies 1a–b found that laypeople think subjective and objective factors contribute independently to the meaningfulness of a person’s life. Studies (...) 2a–b found that positive mental states are thought to make a life more meaningful, even if derived from senseless activities (e.g., hand-copying the dictionary). Studies 3a–b found that agents engaged in morally bad activities are not thought to have meaningful lives, even if they feel fulfilled. In short, both an agents’ subjective mental states and objective impact on the world affect how meaningful their lives appear. (shrink)

This article argues that the notion of the archive is of some value for those interested in the history of the human sciences. Above all, the archive is a means of generating ethical and epistemological credibility. The article goes on to suggest that there are three aspects to modern archival reason: a principle of publicity whereby archival information is made available to some or other kind of public; a principle of singularity according to which archival reason focuses upon questions of (...) detail; and a principle of mundanity, whereby the privileged focus of archival reason is said to be the commonplace dimension of everyday life. (shrink)

It seems remarkable that several philosophers in the Reformed tradition have recently interacted with social practice theory without interacting with each other. This gave rise to the question as to whether they interact differently or similarly with social practice theory and to what extent Reformed philosophy might benefit from such an interaction. In this article, therefore, we aim to clear the way by addressing three strands in Reformed philosophy, namely, Nicholas Wolterstorff, the normative practice approach, and James K. A. Smith. (...) We explore why they use social practice theory, what they do with it, and how they make it their own. Finally, we highlight what unites them and what divides them, and conclude with suggestions as to how they might benefit from each other’s work in social practice theory. (shrink)

Many hold that ordinary race-thinking in the USA is committed to the 'one-drop rule', that race is ordinarily represented in terms of essences, and that race is ordinarily represented as a biological (phenotype- and/or ancestry-based, non-social) kind. This study investigated the extent to which ordinary race-thinking subscribes to these commitments. It also investigated the relationship between different conceptions of race and racial attitudes. Participants included 449 USA adults who completed an Internet survey. Unlike previous research, conceptions of race (...) were assessed using concrete vignettes. Results indicate widespread rejection of the one-drop rule, as well as the use of a complex combination of ancestral, phenotypic, and social (and, therefore, non-essentialist) criteria for racial classification. No relationship was found between racial attitudes and essentialism, the one-drop rule, or social race-thinking; however, ancestry-based and phenotype-based classification criteria were associated with racial attitudes. These results suggest a complicated relationship between conceptions of race and racial attitudes. (shrink)

I start with some of the early challenges to the widely-employed philosophical method of cases—the very challenges that originally prompted the new movement of experimental philosophy—and with some fundamental questions about the method that are yet to have been given satisfying answers. I then propose that what has allowed both ‘armchair’ and ‘experimental’ participants in the ongoing debates concerning the method to ignore or repress those early challenges—and in particular Robert Cummins’s ‘calibration objection’—and to discount fundamental disagreements about those questions, (...) is in large part ‘the claim of continuity’, which is the claim, or assumption, that there is no philosophically significant difference between whatever it is that we do when we give our answer to the theorist’s question of whether some philosophically interesting word ‘applies’ (positively or negatively) to some theoretically significant case, and our use of that same word in the course of ordinary, non-philosophical discourse. I then summarize the ordinary language philosophy (OLP) argument against the claim of continuity, and explain why answers to the theorist’s questions are vulnerable to the calibration objection in a way that our non-philosophical, everyday employment of the same words is not. This then leads me to question another widespread assumption, which is the assumption that the theorist’s questions—as raised in the theorist’s context—have clear enough sense and correct answers. I end by responding to a series of objections to my argument and to OLP more generally. (shrink)

This paper analyses the opposing accounts of ‘the ordinary’ given by Jacques Derrida and Stanley Cavell, beginning with their competing interpretations of J. L. Austin¹s thought on ordinary language. These accounts are presented as mutually critiquing: Derrida¹s deconstructive method poses an effective challenge to Cavell¹s claim that the ordinary is irreducible by further philosophical analysis, while, conversely, Cavell¹s valorisation of the human draws attention to a residual humanity in Derrida¹s text which Derrida cannot account for. The two (...) philosophers’ approaches are, in fact, predicated on each other like the famous Gestalt-image of a vase and two faces: they cannot come into focus at the same time, but one cannot appear without the other to furnish its background. (shrink)

In Art of the Ordinary, Deming brings together the arts, philosophy, and psychology in new and compelling ways so as to offer generative, provocative insights into how we think and represent the world to others as well as to ourselves.

On the surface, it is not clear whether the ordinary citizen in Plato’s Republic possesses the virtue of justice defended in the dialogue. In order to resolve a tension in Plato’s treatment of the ordinary citizen, this paper presents a distinction between the civic justice of the ordinary citizen and the platonic justice of the philosopher. Whereas the justice possessed by the philosopher requires knowledge of the good as well as a reason-governed soul, civic justice requires only (...) true beliefs about justice and a habit or practice of just action. (shrink)

I develop a new version of the ordinary language response to skepticism. My version is based on premises about the practical functions served by our epistemic words. I end by exploring how my argument against skepticism is interestingly non-circular and philosophically valuable.

One of the central questions of material-object metaphysics is which highly visible objects there are right before our eyes. Daniel Z. Korman defends a conservative view, according to which our ordinary, natural judgments about which objects there are are more or less correct. He begins with an overview of the arguments that have led people away from the conservative view, into revisionary views according to which there are far more objects than we ordinarily take there to be or far (...) fewer. Korman criticizes a variety of compatibilist strategies, according to which these revisionary views are actually compatible with our ordinary beliefs. He goes on to respond to debunking arguments; objections that the conservative's verdicts about which objects that are and aren't are objectionably arbitrary; the argument from vagueness; the overdetermination argument; the argument from material constitution; and the problem of the many. (shrink)

The traditional distinction between ordinary, i.e., obligatory means to preserve life and extraordinary, non-obligatory means is an especially useful tool for HECs in today's secular pluralist health care system, because it gives factors that can override the prima facie good of preserving the patient's life. I first indicate the need for such a tool. I then demonstrate the present misunderstanding of the distinction and give its proper understanding. Finally, I show the applicability of the distinction for HEC deliberations about (...) three important types of cases: the conscious, irreversibly but not terminally ill patient who requests cessation of curative treatment; the provision of artificial nutrition and hydration to permanently vegetative patients; and the allotment of intensive care and other scarce medical resources. (shrink)

There is a common-sense view of language, which is held by Wittgenstein, Strawson Dummett, Searle, Putnam, Lewis, Wiggins, and others. According to this view a language consists of conventions, it is rule-governed, rules are conventionalised, a language is learnt, there are general learning mechanisms in the brain, and so on. I shall call this view the ‘ ordinary language ’ view of language. Chomsky’s attitude towards this view of language has been rather negative, and his rejection of it is (...) a major motivation for the development of his own theory. In this paper I shall review Chomsky’s long-standing criticisms. I shall show that Chomsky’s argument does not constitute a dismissal of the ‘ordinarylanguage’ view of language, Chomsky’s conclusions about language do not follow from his argument, and the ‘ ordinary language ’ view actually points to a promising way for us to understand the true nature of language and mind. (shrink)

In Natural Right and History Leo Strauss argues for the continuing “relevance” of the classical understanding of natural right. Since this relevance is not a matter of a direct return, or a renewed appreciation that a neglected doctrine is simply true, the meaning of this claim is some- what elusive. But it is clear enough that the core of Strauss’s argument for that relevance is a claim about the relation between human experience and philosophy. Strauss argues that the classical understanding (...) articulates and is continuous with the “lived experience” of engaged participants in political life, the ordinary, and he argues (in a way quite similar to claims in Heidegger) that such an ordinary or everyday point of view has been “lost.” The author presents here an interpretation and critique of such a claim. (shrink)

This chapter presents an essay on the experiential situation of man and on the aesthetic drama of the ordinary. It states that things from everyday experience are deaestheticized, not only by misuse and failure to maintain them but also in their very conception of design and choice of material. It argues that the lack of appropriate description to account for human experience indicates the comparative bankruptcy of ordinary language and the comparable bankruptcy of ordinary experience.

This radically original book argues for the power of ordinary language philosophy—a tradition inaugurated by Ludwig Wittgenstein and J. L. Austin, and extended by Stanley Cavell—to transform literary studies. In engaging and lucid prose, Toril Moi demonstrates this philosophy’s unique ability to lay bare the connections between words and the world, dispel the notion of literature as a monolithic concept, and teach readers how to learn from a literary text. Moi first introduces Wittgenstein’s vision of language and theory, which (...) refuses to reduce language to a matter of naming or representation, considers theory’s desire for generality doomed to failure, and brings out the philosophical power of the particular case. Contrasting ordinary language philosophy with dominant strands of Saussurean and post-Saussurean thought, she highlights the former’s originality, critical power, and potential for creative use. Finally, she challenges the belief that good critics always read below the surface, proposing instead an innovative view of texts as expression and action, and of reading as an act of acknowledgment. Intervening in cutting-edge debates while bringing Wittgenstein, Austin, and Cavell to new readers, Revolution of the Ordinary will appeal beyond literary studies to anyone looking for a philosophically serious account of why words matter. (shrink)