Stephen Mulhall

Stanley Cavell : philosophy's recounting of the ordinary

This is a philosophical study of the work of Stanley Cavell, best known for his seminal contributions to the fields of film studies, Shakespearian literary criticism, and the confluence of psychoanalysis and literary theory. Cavells project originated in his interpretation of Austins and Wittgensteins ordinary-language philosophy and is given unity by an abiding concern with the nature and the varying cultural manifestations of the sceptical impulse in modernity. This book elucidates the esentially philosophical roots and trajectory of Cavells work, traces its links with Romanticism and its recent turn towards a species of moral perfectionism associated with Thoreau and Emerson, and concludes with an assessment of its relations to liberal-democratic political theory, Christian religious thought and feminist literary studies. It will be of interest to anyone concerned with the relationships between Anglo-American and Continental philosophy, and between philosophy and other disciplines in the humanities. It should also be of interest to philosophers interested in the relation between the British, American and European philosophical traditions; anyone interested in the interplay between philosophy, literary criticism and theory, film studies and psychoanalysis.

Ethics in the Light Of Wittgenstein

Abstract This paper examines a number of ways in which Wittgensteins later philosophical method has been appropriated for moral philosophy. The work of Paul Johnston, Sabina Lovibond and Cora Diamond is discussed in relation to the following questions. Is there a sustainable distinction between ethics and meta-ethics (in the form, say, of distinctively ethical language games and grammatical reminders about them)? What role does the imagination, and hence the domain of literature, play in ethical understanding? How far does ethical discourse presuppose, and hence find itself constrained by, the shared natural reactions of a specific culture or form of life?

Wittgenstein and the Philosophy of Religion

Wittgensteinian approaches to issues in the philosophy of religion have plainly been amongst the most consequential in the discipline in the postwar period. This is not, of course, because a general consensus in their favour has been established; on the contrary, if anything unites contemporary philosophers of religion, it is their deep suspicion of both the specific claims and the general methodology of those of their colleagues who have adopted a Wittgensteinian perspective. Nevertheless, it is rare to find a philosopher of religion who does not define her own position, at least in part, by specifying the nature of and the grounds for her rejection of work carried out under the Wittgensteinian banner. In this respect, that work continues to function as an essential reference point in the discipline — something that can no longer be said of many other fields of philosophical endeavour, even in the philosophy of mind or the philosophy of language (where some of Wittgenstein’s specific claims continue to attract interest, but the general methodological principles which anchor and account for them are barely mentioned, let alone specifically criticized).

In Space, No-one Can Hear You Scream: Acknowledging the Human Voice in the Alien Universe

In my recent book, On Film, I offered (amongst other things) a reading of the four Alien movies which originates in response to the specific mode of monstrousness that the alien species embodies. My suggestion was that, beyond the threat of their violence (to which terror is the proper response), we are horrified by their drive to involve human beings in their essentially parasitic mode of reproduction. For that process – whereby the alien inserts a long, flexible member into the body of its host through one of that body’s orifices, and deposits thereby a version of itself which develops within the host’s torso to the point at which it must force itself out again – is a nightmare vision of human heterosexual intercourse, pregnancy and birth. The alien species is, in other words, an incarnation of masculinity, understood as penetrative sexual violence; but as such, it threatens the human race as a whole with the apparently monstrous fate of feminisation, forcing our species to occupy the sexual role (that of being violated, playing host to a parasite, and of facing death in giving birth) that women are imagined to occupy in relation to men.

Attunement and Disorientation: The Moods of Philosophy in Heidegger and Sartre

This essay employs Heidegger’s philosophical analysis of the moodedness of human understanding of the world in order to evaluate the significance of the moods in and through which specifically philosophical understanding is achieved in the phenomenological tradition. First, Heidegger’s Being and Time is shown to be critically informed by the moods of anxiety and perplexity; then boredom is shown to be the determining mood of his Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics; and finally, the significance of shame as a topic within, and a mode of attunement of, Sartre’s Being and Nothingness is assessed.

The Violence of Paint

If great art is that which stands the test of time, then this opulent retrospective (marking, or rather slightly anticipating, the centenary of the painter’s birth) gives us the opportunity to evaluate Francis Bacon’s achievement at a particularly interesting point in that complex, obscure but remorseless process. His death (in 1992) is now sufficiently distant for the lingering sense of a living presence lost to have dissipated, and for Bacon’s own carefully-orchestrated presentations of himself and his work to have shed their aura of unquestionable authority; and although the scholars are moving quickly in to erect their own preferred interpretations, the results of their efforts have not yet attained the air of serene obviousness needed to conceal the brute force and even bare-faced bodging sometimes involved in their construction. Neither fully contemporary nor truly consigned to history, Bacon’s lingeringly liminal status is in fact a valuable gift to the viewer, for it means that the individual paintings have freed themselves from the interpretative grasp of their creator without yet having been reduced to instances of a particular art-historical or art-critical category. They are there to be experienced, in all their obscure, idiosyncratic power, one by one; and what they convey most immediately and undeniably is the fact that they are paintings – that is, paintings rather than photographs or cultural critiques or

‘All the World Must Be “Religious”’: Iris Murdoch’s Ontological Arguments

Perhaps because it appears at a relatively late stage in the progress of Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals, the long chapter that Murdoch devotes to the ontological argument for the existence of God seems to me to draw together many of its central themes, and hence of Murdoch’s work as a whole, as it explores the intermediate zone between philosophy, secular morality and religious belief. Of course, to many philosophers, the idea that there is such a zone — let alone the idea that the ontological argument might serve to delineate its boundaries and structure — would be hard to take seriously. For myself, the inability to take such ideas seriously is rather a criterion for having lost touch with the kinds of interests and motives that bring us to philosophy in the first place, and that first made a place of honour for philosophy in human culture. Such differences between conceptions of the subject may ultimately be beyond the reach of argument; but they are surely not beyond evaluation. And anyway, as Murdoch herself puts it, ‘in philosophy we go where the honey is. Some thinkers are, for us, live and life-giving, others are dead […] Anyone in the philosophical trade seeks in other philosophers for ideas which they can profitably understand, whether or not they also make them their own’.1

The Well Is Not the World: William Golding’s Sense of Reality in Darkness Visible

This essay is a study of the writer William Golding’s distinctive ways of generating what one might call a sense of reality in his novel Darkness Visible, which appeared at a point in the history of English literature at which the project of literary realism found itself in a condition of modernism. I understand this condition as one in which one’s relation to history has become an undismissable problem: in the case of Golding’s novel, this relationship is at once to the history of England, the history of religion, and the history of literature (specifically, its roots in classical Roman texts; in Shakespearean versions of pastoral; and in the fabular as presented in fairy tales). Exploring these links involves exploiting resources from the philosophy of Wittgenstein, and from work I have previously published on J.M. Coetzee’s exemplification of modernist realism in literature.

Cats on the Table, New Blood for Old Dogs: What Distinguishes Reading Philosophers (on Poets) from Reading Poets?

Secondly, as utterances, our performances are also heir to certain other kinds of ill which infect all utterances. And these likewise, although again they might be brought into a more general account, we are deliberately at present excluding. I mean, for example, the following: a performative utterance will be in a peculiar way hollow or void if said by an actor on the stage, or introduced in a poem, or spoken in soliloquy. This applies in a similar manner to any and every utterance — a sea-change in special circumstances. Language in such circumstances is in special ways — intelligibly — used not seriously, but in ways parasitic upon its normal use — ways which fall under the doctrine of the etiolations of language. All this we are excluding from consideration. Our performative utterances, felicitous or not, are to be understood as issued in ordinary circumstances.

“Loopings Among the Parts”: Stanley Cavell’s The Claim of Reason

This short essay takes guidance from the preface Cavell supplied for the 1999 edition of The Claim of Reason, in order to consider the ways its first three parts interact with one another, just as much as with its fourth and final part. It argues that the book’s account of human action invites us to explore a particular reflexive dimension of its author’s sense of the inter-relatedness of scepticism about the external world and scepticism about other minds; for it suggests that traditional Wittgensteinian responses to the external world sceptic subject him to a form of other minds scepticism, and thereby subvert the extent to which Wittgensteinian philosophical practice (properly understood) constitutes a proof of the reality and accessibility of other minds.