To save content items to your account,
please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies.
If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account.
Find out more about saving content to .
To save content items to your Kindle, first ensure no-reply@cambridge-org.demo.remotlog.com
is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings
on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part
of your Kindle email address below.
Find out more about saving to your Kindle.
Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations.
‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi.
‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.
The book of Ecclesiastes is the Bible's problem child. Its probing doubts, dark ruminations, self- reflexive dialogues, and unflinching observations have simultaneously puzzled and fascinated readers for over two millennia. Some read the book's message as hopelessly pessimistic, while others regard the text as too contradictory to bear any consistent message at all. In this study, Jesse Peterson offers a coherent portrait of the book and its author-the early Jewish sage known as Qoheleth-by examining both through a philosophical lens. Drawing from relevant contemporary philosophical literature on meaning in life, death, well-being, and enjoyment, Peterson outlines a clear and compelling portrait of Qoheleth and his philosophical assumptions about what is good and bad in the human experience. As Peterson argues, Qoheleth's grievances concerning the pursuit of meaning in life are paired with a genuine affirmation of life's value and the possibility of a joy-filled existence.
The Introduction offers a brief overview of why Wittgenstein has come to matter to contemporary literary studies and philosophical work on literature. In addition to explaining what literary Wittgensteinianism is, it provides a point of entry into the chapters of this volume by explaining the basic difference between the early and late Wittgenstein and how each has opened up novel ways of thinking about the relationship between philosophy and literature.
This chapter highlights how Cavell’s pioneering interpretation of Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations in “The Availability of Wittgenstein’s Later Philosophy” bears on literary studies. It traces an influential misreading of the Investigations deriving from Jean-François Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition (1979) whose understanding of “language-games” has become foundational to the conception of postmodern literature put forth by leading literary scholars, even as it relies on an unacknowledged simplification of how Wittgenstein understands the linked concepts of “language-games” and “rules” in the Investigations.
Cavell’s “Availability” essay exposes the problems with this postmodern reading of Wittgenstein. As Cavell makes clear, Wittgenstein compares the “rules” of language to “moves in a game” in part because he wishes to emphasize the differences between these two cases: unlike those of, say, a board game, the rules of “everyday language” cannot be exhaustively listed or written down, and yet, “the absence of such a structure in no way impairs its [i.e., language’s] functioning.” For this reason, as the “Availability” essay shows, “rules” turn out to be a concept of only secondary importance within the Investigations; rather, language-games emerge against the backdrop of what Wittgenstein calls “forms of life” or, elsewhere, “the natural history of human beings.”
In 1969 Stanley Cavell's Must We Mean What We Say? revolutionized philosophy of ordinary language, aesthetics, ethics, tragedy, literature, music, art criticism, and modernism. This volume of new essays offers a multi-faceted exploration of Cavell's first and most important book, fifty years after its publication. The key subjects which animate Cavell's book are explored in detail: ordinary language, aesthetics, modernism, skepticism, forms of life, philosophy and literature, tragedy and the self, the questions of voice and audience, jazz and sound, Wittgenstein, Austin, Beckett, Kierkegaard, Shakespeare. The essays make Cavell's complex style and sometimes difficult thought accessible to a new generation of students and scholars. They offer a way into Cavell's unique philosophical voice, conveying its seminal importance as an intellectual intervention in American thought and culture, and showing how its philosophical radicality remains of lasting significance for contemporary philosophy, American philosophy, literary studies, and cultural studies.
Demetrios Capetanakis was one of the first writers to introduce Marcel Proust to the Greek public in the 1930s. His study of Proust's philosophy (hitherto known only in the English and Greek translations of a lecture he delivered in French) survives in manuscript form, both in French and in an earlier German version. An examination of these texts in the context of Proust's early reception allows us to follow Capetanakis’ intellectual trajectory, as well as to sketch his particular joint approach to literature and philosophy, which is largely indebted to the works of Plato and Kierkegaard. Capetanakis seeks Proust's philosophy not in the universal laws put forth in his novel, but in the writer's attempt to conceal behind them the real pain and agony that marked his own life. This leads him to a rather unusual philosophical reading of Proust's novel and, in the process, of Plato's Phaedrus.
Recommend this
Email your librarian or administrator to recommend adding this to your organisation's collection.
