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Examines the advent of logical positivism, the development of conceptual analysis, ordinary language philosophy, the so‐called death of political theory, the impact of linguistic philosophy and the influence of Wittgenstein's thought on political theory, and particularly the idea of ‘essential contestability’.

This introduction describes the background and legacy of Austin’s thought, going beyond the standard picture of him as an effectively obsolete ‘doyen of ordinary language philosophy’. It situates Austin’s philosophy in its original intellectual milieu, focusing in particular on the significance of his immediate predecessors, G. E. Moore and H. A. Prichard. It then looks at the various ways in which Austin’s ideas have been appropriated by speech act theorists (via Grice and Searle), by performativity theorists (via Derrida and Butler), in discussions of pornography and free speech (via Hornsby and Langton), and by others such as Quentin Skinner, H. L. A. Hart, Stanley Cavell, Charles Travis, and Mark Kaplan. Finally it provides an overview of the remaining chapters of the book.

Ordinary language philosophy (OLP) is the philosophical tradition after Wittgenstein and Austin as constituted and extended by Cavell. OLP is also influenced by Diamond. The introduction provides a road-map of the book. It discusses the neglected status of OLP in literary studies today. In relation to the exhausted, yet still dominant post-Saussurean tradition in literary studies, OLP represents a paradigm-shift, providing a much needed new vision of language and theory in literary studies. Yet it has proven difficult for readers trained in the post-Saussurean tradition to perceive the revolutionary difference of OLP. Misunderstandings arise because of OLP's “intimate conflicts” with analytic philosophy and with deconstruction (their concerns look the same, but are in fact quite different). What do Wittgenstein and Diamond mean when they say that a particular philosophical view has the “wrong picture” of how a phenomenon works? Ending on a discussion of Wittgenstein's quest for philosophical clarity, the introduction stresses that this book, like other utterances, is at once an act of self-expression and an appeal to others. We write in search of community. But there is no guarantee that one will be found. To write is to risk rebuff.

Suppose you want to question my claim to know that the bird in my garden is a goldfinch. Austin held that you cannot legitimately demand that I do more than ‘enough to show that (within reason, and for the present intents and purposes) it “can’t” be anything else, there is no room for an alternative, competing, description of it’, where it is understood that ‘[e]nough is enough […]. It does not mean, for example, enough to show it isn’t a stuffed goldfinch’. But why not? This chapter argues that (i) the standard answers are not available to Austin, (ii) Austin’s writings and methods (including his characteristic way of arguing for philosophical conclusions via appeal to what we would say when) make available a different and novel diagnosis of what goes wrong with scepticism based on arguments from ignorance, and (iii) these methods—comprising Austin’s ‘ordinary language philosophy‘—have been misunderstood, and their power underestimated.

The chapter explores the general nature of mental states such as belief, desire, and intentions, and their relation to brain states It does this through an extended analysis of the Freudian theory of the unconscious. Rightly conceived, the Freudian unconscious is seen as functionally characterized, sub-personal states of the brain that underlie the mental states of whole persons. The folk psychology on which the criminal law’s culpability discriminations are built, is thus seen to be secure against the insights of a progressive, scientific psychology, be it Freudian, behaviourist, cognitive, neuroscientific, or other.

This chapter evaluates Cavell’s reception of Austin’s ordinary language philosophy, showing it to be more critical than it has been understood to be. For Austin, the ordinary language philosopher speaks in the first-person plural to remind other philosophers of “what we say when” so as to correct the mistakes those philosophers have made in writing about ethics, epistemology, etc. But Austin cannot give a compelling explanation of why those other philosophers require such reminders: how can they have been wrong about their language and its implications, since they too are one of us who speak the language? On Cavell’s account, we forget what we say when—or, what comes to the same thing, fail to mean what we say—because we evade ourselves. Ordinary language philosophy does not correct mistakes but addresses the uncanny nature of the ordinary, that it is not yet what it is.

This chapter describes a method of doing philosophy, the method of “ordinary language” philosophy, or more appropriately, “piecemeal philosophical engineering.” It then applies this method to three questions connected with the concept of freedom: What makes the problem of free will so difficuult to grasp, and hence so difficult to solve? What is the moral value of freedom, that is, does it have an “absolute” value rather than a “conditional” value? In what respects is freedom a “negative” concept? The chapter first considers reasons why we should avoid saying either that philosophy is or is not linguistic before explaining the use of “free from” as a verbal and adjectival phrase, along with adverbial freedom and adjectival freedom. It also looks at cases of the idiom “free to,” plus a couple of sentences just involving “free” as a contrast, and concludes with an analysis of freedom as “trouser-word.”

The epilogue shifts the scene of analysis to matters of disciplinary or academic askesis. It addresses questions of methodology arising from the problem of accurately describing and historicizing a property as diffuse as moral imperfection; otherwise, a cynic art of the un-manifest that consists more in dismantling existing systems than in clarifying modular alternatives. Always conjectural and provisional, as also geared toward the unimaginable, does the ethics of imperfection require an imperfectionist style of narration and of thought? The discussion presents a manifesto for an ahimsaic or non-violent historiography. A two-part analysis generalizes some themes from the material in earlier chapters, and turns summary attention to an additional archive drawn from post-war ordinary language philosophy.

How does the category of modernism inform our understanding of Wittgenstein’s philosophy, and how does Wittgenstein’s philosophy elucidate the category of modernism? The essays in this volume take up these questions as they consider how different aspects of Wittgenstein’s philosophy intersect with various uses of the term modernism. Wittgenstein’s philosophy enacts or embodies, alternately or simultaneously, modernism as an historical period, an aesthetic style, and a philosophical worldview. Yet even as the concept of modernism affords new understandings of Wittgenstein’s philosophy, Wittgenstein’s multifaceted philosophy raises the vexing question of modernism itself. In discussing Wittgenstein’s philosophy alongside modernist figures such as Beckett, Bellow, Benjamin, James, Joyce, Kafka, Loos, Musil, Stevens, and Woolf, the essays collected in this volume note not simply that one can situate Wittgenstein’s philosophy within cultural modernism but also that Wittgenstein presents a modernist philosophy of culture. In so doing, they make clear a range of possible topics, thus stretching and developing the understanding of what can be included in the new modernist studies and also presenting new ways of understanding Wittgenstein’s modernist philosophy.

In this introductory chapter, Paul Standish and Naoko Saito outline the multiple ways in which education figures in the work of Stanley Cavell. Hilary Putnam's description of Cavell as not only as one of the most creative thinkers of today but one of the few contemporary philosophers to explore the territory of philosophy as education is an apt assessment of his conception of philosophy. Yet Cavell's own somewhat enigmatic emphasis on a phrase, “philosophy as the education of grownups,” is not to be understood from one side alone. His preoccupation with the idea of philosophy as education runs throughout his work – through his fascination with Austin and ordinary language philosophy, Wittgenstein and skepticism, Emerson and Thoreau, film and literature. It is there at the heart of his masterwork, The Claim of Reason, where he writes: “philosophy becomes the education of grownups” (Cavell, 1979, p. 125). While mainstream philosophy tends to have given insufficient attention to the emphasis on education in his work, amongst educators his thought is largely still to be received. The editors introduce the book as answering to this need.

Contemporary analytic philosophy is dominated by metaphilosophical naturalism, the view that philosophy ought to be in some sense continuous with science. According to contemporary naturalists, we cannot study the nature of mind, knowledge, language, meaning, and reality without taking into account the results from physics, linguistics, and the cognitive sciences. This chapter examines Quine’s evolving views on the relation between science and philosophy in 1950s and 1960s. Scrutinizing both the development of and the external responses to Word and Object, it examines how Quine became increasingly aware of the metaphilosophical implications of the views he had first developed in the late 1940s and early 1950s. In the final sections, this chapter offers a detailed reconstruction of Quine’s decision to label his position “naturalism.”

If descriptivism is at the heart of liberalism’s method, then, at least for postliberals, rejecting the method of liberal theology requires a rejection of the descriptivist understanding of language. This is what postliberal theologians like Frei and Lindbeck do. They turn to the later Wittgenstein and those ordinary language philosophers, such as Gilbert Ryle, he influenced. In his later years, Wittgenstein abandoned the project of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus on which he had embarked in his earlier years as both a follower and a critic of Russell. This chapter describes the project of the Tractatus in order to understand Wittgenstein’s later rejection of it and what he thought the proper approach to language should be. The chapter discusses Wittgenstein’s later reflections on following a rule, the role of the community in establishing the proper uses of language, and the relationship of such ruled use to linguistic meaning. The chapter then discusses Ryle’s rejection of a “third realm” of abstract objects, his distinction between “knowing that” and “knowing how,” as well as his rejection of the “ghost in the machine” as part of an understanding of human identity. All these philosophical reflections provide crucial allies to postliberal development of Barth’s project.

Chapter 8 looks at ‘linguistic philosophy’ in middle and late Wittgenstein and in J. L. Austin. In ordinary language philosophy, myth emerged not from charismatic demagogues but from the fervid minds of scientistic intellectuals. Wittgenstein and Austin share the conviction that ‘language as such’ is the antidote to the metaphysical entanglements that arise from this scientism. But this ordinary version of ‘language as such’ is not simply present to the naked eye and ear, but is only available as the end result of strategies of philosophical clarification, which make language a manifestation of life. The chapter therefore focuses on Wittgenstein’s idea of the perspicuous representation and Austin’s techniques of drawing out distinctions. It turns out that clarification is an ambiguous exercise: Wittgenstein’s belief that ‘language always works’ runs aground when he compares language to music, which, it turns out, doesn’t work, at least not in the twentieth century.

This article focuses on pastness in the work of Stanley Cavell. For Cavell the past is only real to the extent that it reveals itself in our present, and the only proper way to attend to the historical past is to absorb it in an orphic mode, with our back turned, without looking. The sustained attention to the present is the best and the only archaeology of the past: “the time is always now.” Absorption of the past in the present is here opposed to the attitude of spectatorship with respect to the past. But is absorption without loss possible? Already in 1980, Michael Fried had to concede that “there can be no such thing as an absolutely anti-theatrical work of art.” This remark can be taken to apply to historiography, too. Is an absolutely anti-theatrical approach to the past possible (i.e., one in which the past would be absorbed without loss, but also without facing it directly)? To what extent should the proposed absorption of the past in the ordinary language philosophy be seen as an evacuation?

This chapter is concerned with the commonalities between Austin and Wittgenstein. Both philosophers subscribe to a form of realism that one hardly dares call realism, since it is precisely what is forgotten or rejected by philosophy today and in the debates over realism. The difficulties in ordinary language philosophy's reception are not new, and Cavell's first texts showed particularly well the accumulated misunderstandings of Wittgenstein's work and, to a lesser degree, of Austin's. Cavell, in Must We Mean What We Say?, goes against the dominant theory of the time, emotivism— a doctrine that still plays a determining role in thought today. This doctrine derives from the idea that only cognitive statements, which represent “states of affairs,” are veritable statements endowed with “meaning,” and other statements therefore cannot express anything except an emotive attitude regarding such statements.