ABSTRACT
One of the most distinctive and fundamental aspects of Stanley Cavell’s work is his reading of Wittgenstein’s relation to philosophical skepticism. The basic contours of this reading, known to all those familiar with Cavell’s work, may be captured in this passage:
[The work of Austin and the later Wittgenstein] is commonly thought to represent an effort to refute philosophical skepticism, as expressed most famously in Descartes and in Hume, and an essential drive of my book The Claim of Reason . . . is to show that, at least in the case of Wittgenstein, this is a fateful distortion, that Wittgenstein’s teaching is on the contrary that skepticism is (not exactly true, but not exactly false either; it is) a standing threat to, or temptation of, the human mind – that our ordinary language and its representation of the world can be philosophically repudiated and that it is essential to our inheritance and mutual possession of language, as well as to what inspires philosophy, that this should be so.1
