Award Name

Open Access Senior Award Winner

Researcher ORCID Identifier

0009-0006-5927-530X

Description/Abstract

This literature review examines two major strands of Cavellian scholarship on Wittgenstein, arguing that their relative separation has obscured the insights each offers the other. Cavell’s “therapeutic” reading of Wittgenstein understands his philosophical project not as a theory of language but as an activity aimed at dissolving the philosophical fantasy of such a theory. This approach has been taken up along two largely distinct lines of inquiry: one focused on the Tractatus and the debate between substantial and austere views of nonsense, and another centered on the Philosophical Investigations and its relation to ordinary language philosophy, particularly in light of Derrida’s critique of J. L. Austin. The former is primarily exegetical, asking what Wittgenstein meant in declaring his own propositions nonsense; the latter primarily evaluative, asking which philosophical project more effectively resists metaphysical conceptions of language. This review surveys both debates and highlights productive parallels between them. In doing so, it brings into view Wittgenstein’s therapeutic method as particularly sensitive to forms of alienation at the level of the subject, a feature that distinguishes it from both Derrida’s structurally oriented deconstruction and the substantial view’s retention of ineffable truth. At stake are broader questions about what language can express, what meaning is, and what philosophy — as a necessarily linguistic endeavor — is for.

Keywords: Wittgenstein, Cavell, therapeutic reading, nonsense, ordinary language philosophy, deconstruction, alienation

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