Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of California, San Diego, 2006. / Title from first page of PDF file (viewed November 17, 2006). Available via ProQuest Digital Dissertations. Vita. Includes bibliographical references (p. 196-201).

My dissertation applies narrative theory and ordinary language philosophy to two major works bookending medieval English literature: Beowulf and Le Morte Darthur. Capitalizing on the descriptive power of narrative theory's lexicon, I outline the aesthetics, rhetoric, and other effects on the reader when these medieval writers depict transgressive movements--theoretically termed metalepsis--across borders in the story world, and over boundaries separating that world from our own. I often find that spatial transgressions, as they are visualized in narrative terms, entail or simultaneously occur with a breakdown of the fourth wall separating fiction from its audience. Malory's Sir Lancelot crosses into a spiritual world in pursuit of the Holy Grail only to arrive at an awareness of his existence as narrated fiction. My dissertation argues that moments like this, first analyzed through narrative theory, challenge the reader to recognize the fictional character's force of life, and in so doing expand the imagination to reconsider those metaphysical distinctions that have long rendered the nonhuman inferior. Those distinctions are unnecessary and often senseless, I argue. The ethics of reading fiction that I propose seeks the acknowledgment of limits to knowledge, to what we can claim to know about literature, its characters, and, indeed, our fellow human beings. Given that they are constructed by our ordinary language use, fictional characters are the essence of the other. Fictions, then, and as Stanley Cavell would agree, serve as testing grounds for our capacities of acknowledgment. I argue that both the Beowulf poet and Malory fashioned fictional worlds that preserve a secular heroism from potentially hostile contexts. In the process, these medieval narratives show us that fictional characters move us as a matter of ordinary language--our ordinary interactions with narrative: they play a significant role in our lives that cannot be reduced to any particular theory. There is no need for recourse to ontological, or theological, frameworks to invest them with some unutterable or mysterious meaning. They matter as a matter of course.

This study claims that formally experimental novels written in the early twentieth century place urgent, if often implicit, demands for acknowledgment upon their readers. Scholars have long held that the economic and cultural upheavals of the early twentieth century led novelists to doubt language’s referential capacities. But, even as signal modernist works by E.M. Forster, Virginia Woolf, William Faulkner, and others move away from a view of language as a means of gaining knowledge, they also underscore its capacity to grant acknowledgment; they treat words as tools for recognizing and responding to the inner lives of others. Stanley Cavell finds such a vision of language in Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations (1953), a work Cavell describes as “modernist.” This dissertation demonstrates that Wittgenstein’s interest in acknowledgment emerges via his negotiation of the same historical forces with which literary modernism grapples: industrialization, World War, cross-cultural encounter. I argue that modernist representations of consciousness offer readers a way of hearing what Wittgenstein calls “the silent soliloquy of others,” giving us words by which we might adopt an attitude of acknowledgment toward the otherwise unvoiced inner lives of socially marginalized figures. Chapter One considers the crisis of reason that convulses early twentieth-century Britain and demonstrates how Forster’s Howards End (1910) and Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway (1925) critique excessive commitments to rationality as counterproductive to the acknowledgment of politically disenfranchised citizens. Chapter Two discusses Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier (1915), Woolf’s To the Lighthouse (1927), and Nella Larsen’s Passing (1929): three texts that, I show, cast traditional Victorian marriage as an unsatisfying form of intimacy and depict speakers hesitant to acknowledge their desires for alternative, same-sex modes of intimate relation. Chapter Three examines Faulkner’s portrayal of capitalist modernization in The Sound and the Fury (1929) and As I Lay Dying (1930), arguing that characters in these novels insist on the immitigable privacy of their experiences and struggle accordingly to gain acknowledgment from family members. Chapter Four reads Richard Wright’s Black Boy (1945) and Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952) as two texts that represent the psychological experience of having one’s humanity go brutally unacknowledged under Jim Crow. / 2020-11-07T00:00:00Z

Comment penser la construction et la déconstruction du genre dans le langage ? Je montre que la philosophie du langage ordinaire — et notamment la théorie austinienne des actes de parole — peut soutenir une approche constructiviste et éclairer le rôle du langage dans la construction sociale du genre. La naturalisation du genre repose à la fois sur une représentation du langage — comme simple reflet du réel et comme « capacité » inégalement partagée — et sur des pratiques linguistiques ordinaires et scientifiques. Penser cela implique de dépasser la stricte dichotomie de l’idéologique et du matériel, pour analyser ensemble la construction et la représentation du genre dans des pratiques discursives et non-discursives. La théorie butlerienne de la « performativité du genre » permet de penser à la fois la construction du genre et sa contingence, sa possible déconstruction. Mais quel est notre pouvoir transformateur ? Si montrer qu’un phénomène n’est pas naturel ne suffit pas à le détruire, analyser sa force ne nous réduit-il pas à l’impuissance ? Pour répondre à ces questions, j’étudie des pratiques discursives de lutte. Je montre le pouvoir transformateur de pratiques de subversions et d’actes de parole insurrectionnels, qui font usage de la performativité du langage pour transformer les conditions sociales encadrant l’efficacité des discours. Je montre que ces pratiques déconstruisent le genre et produisent des collectifs de lutte, pour insister sur ce qu’une approche radicalement constructiviste du genre ouvre comme possibles pour le féminisme et l’action collective. / How is gender constructed and deconstructed in ordinary practices of language? First of all, I demonstrate that ordinary language philosophy – and more specifically the austinian theory of speech acts – can lay the ground for a constructivist approach and help to understand the role of language in the social construction of gender. I show that gender is naturalized both by our representation of language itself – as a mere reflect of reality and as an unequally shared “capacity” – and by ordinary and scientific practices of language. Understanding this idea involves going beyond the dichotomy of ideological and material, in order to analyze construction and representation of gender together in both discursive and non-discursive practices. Butler’s theory of gender performativity makes it possible to understand both construction and deconstruction, or the contingency of gender. But does not highlighting the strength of this construction lead to deny our power and agency? To answer this question, I study feminist discursive practices. I highlight transformative power of subversions and insurrectional speech acts. I analyze discursive practices of denaturalization that challenge both social and discursive orders, and practices that use language performativity to change the social conditions that give power to speech acts. These practices deconstruct gender and produce political and collective subjects: a radical constructivist approach to gender thus opens rich perspectives for feminism and collective activism.

Doctorat en philosophie et lettres / info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished

De quelle notion de sujet avons-nous besoin rendre compte de nos pratiques et notamment de notre pratique du langage ? Cette question du sujet et de la subjectivité se pose à nouveaux frais dans le cadre de la philosophie du langage ordinaire et tout particulièrement à partir de la théorie des actes de parole de J.L. Austin. En effet, si le langage n’a de signification qu’en tant que parole, et même qu’en tant qu’acte d’un sujet qui prend la parole, le langage ne saurait être un processus sans sujet. Un acte nécessite un agent et si cet acte est un acte de parole, il faut un agent capable de comprendre la signification de ce qui est dit, en d'autres termes, il semble bien qu’il faille un sujet pensant, un sujet psychologique. C’est dans cette voie que s’engagèrent les premières interprétations d’Austin. Les actes de parole donnèrent naissance d’une nouvelle discipline : la pragmatique, où le rôle de l’intention dans la signification est primordial. Or, la philosophie du langage ordinaire se situe dans le projet initial de la philosophie analytique, tel que mené par Frege, Russell et le premier Wittgenstein, qui détachaient la signification de la subjectivité des représentations en la liant à la référence ou dénotation. Le sujet psychologique se trouve alors hors du champ de la pensée et de la vérité. Austin poursuit et radicalise ce projet : dans la théorie des actes de parole, la vérité devient la dimension d’évaluation de certains énoncés à l’intérieur de la catégorie plus générale de la félicité, évaluation qui n’est possible qu’en situant l’énonciation dans son contexte. C’est donc le contexte, et non l’intériorité du sujet parlant qui permet la compréhension. Ainsi, Le sujet des actes de paroles n’est pas le sujet intentionnel du mentalisme. C’est en fait un sujet pensant dont la pensée se lit dans le comportement, un sujet dont la pensée publique se fonde et s’exprime dans des conventions sociales qui le rendent responsables de ses paroles. Le sujet parlant est un sujet social pour qui l’enjeu est de parvenir à trouver et faire entendre sa voix alors même qu’il parle dans les mots des autres, un sujet responsable et mis en position de fragilité car il doit répondre de plus qu’il ne le voudrait. / What kind of a notion of subject do we need in order to account for our practices, and especially our practice of language? The issue of subject and subjectivity is raised anew within the ordinary language philosophy, more particularly within J.L. Austin's speech acts theory. As a matter of fact, if language has a meaning only inasmuch as it is a speech—the speech act of a subject—language cannot be a process devoid of subject. There must be an agent to perform an act, and if the act is a speech act, the agent must be able to understand what is meant, in other words, what seems to be needed is a thinking, psychological subject. Austin's first interpretations actually went down that path. Speech acts gave birth to a new theory: pragmatics, in which intention plays a key role in meaning. Nevertheless, ordinary language philosophy is in continuity with the original project of analytical philosophy as conducted by Frege, Russell and the first Wittgenstein, who separated the meaning from the subjectivity of representations and linked it instead to the reference or denotation. The psychological subject is then excluded from the field of thought and truth. Austin continues and toughens that project. Within the speech acts theory, truth becomes the assessment dimension of some utterances within the more general category of felicity—such an assessment being possible only when the issuing of the utterance is inserted in its whole context. Therefore, what enables comprehension is context, not inwardness. So, the subject of speech acts isn't the intentional subject of mentalism. In fact, it's a subject whose thought is to be read in their behaviour, a subject whose public thought is based on and expressed in social conventions which make them responsible for what they say. The speaking subject is a social subject whose issue is to find their voice and make themselves heard, although they speak in other people's words, a responsible subject in a vulnerable position as they must answer for more than they care for.

Chaque activité humaine nécessite d’avoir sa propre méthode pour obtenir un résultat concret et satisfaisant. C’est ainsi le cas pour la philosophie, une discipline qui compte 2500 d’histoire et dont la méthode est alors délimitée par les philosophes et les autres personnes. Quelle est donc cette méthode philosophique? Il existe plusieurs réponses. Cette thèse va donc tenter de répondre à cette question en introduisant un projet de méthode philosophique dénommée « Conceptual Tuning » [l’accord conceptuel]. Les boxeurs ne se préoccupent généralement pas de la question conceptuelle « Qu’est-ce que la boxe? ». De même les biologistes se posent à peine la question de savoir « Qu’est-ce que la biologie ». Pour eux, ce genre de questions sont extérieures à leur discipline. Cependant pour la philosophie, la question de la nature de la philosophie est une question bien interne à cette discipline. La conscience de soi est une condition sine quo non pour « faire de la philosophie ».Puisque la philosophie possède une si longue histoire et tant de traditions diverses et variées, on présuppose donc qu’il existe de très nombreuses méthodes pour « faire de la philosophie ». Ma thèse tentera donc de contribuer à cette discussion portant sur la méthodologie philosophique en proposant une méthode que j’appellerai « Conceptual Tuning ». Cet accord conceptuel sera principalement développé à partir de la méthode « Conceptual Engineering » déjà utilisée dans la philosophie depuis, dont les défenseurs s’efforcent d’améliorer nos concepts tels que « personne », « libéral », « science ». Cette thèse présentera ainsi six versions de « Conceptual Engineering », à savoir le « Conceptual Engineering » de Cappelen, la Méthode d’Explication de Carnap, le Révisionnisme Moral de Zagzebski, la Guerre Lexique de Ludlow, la Négociation Métalinguistique de Plunkett et l’Approche d’Amélioration de Haslanger. Ces six approches estiment déjà que nos concepts pourraient être défectueux, et c’est la tâche du philosophe de les « réparer ». Alors que la plupart des approches de « Conceptual Engineering » ne font que se concentrer étroitement sur la perspective de « réparation », cette thèse soutiendra que l’accord conceptuel exige que l’attention soit plutôt portée sur une perspective « expressive ». En d’autres termes, il faudrait employer cette méthode dans un cadre général de la pratique consistant à demander et à donner des raisons. Cette thèse soutiendra également que d’autres méthodes philosophiques importantes telles que la méthode de Brandomian, la philosophie du langage ordinaire et l’analyse conceptuelle traditionnelle peuvent être bien incorporées dans le projet d’accord conceptuel. Ainsi, au lieu d’être en opposition, ces méthodes sont en fait conformes à l’accord conceptuel ces méthodes s’intègrent parfaitement à l’accord conceptuel. / Different human practices require various methods to carry them out successfully. Philosophy, an activity with 2500 years of history, must also have its own method, which demarcates a philosopher from a lay person. This thesis embarks on a project of philosophical method—conceptual tuning. How to do philosophy belongs to the category of metaphilosophy or philosophy of philosophy. Boxers usually do not care about the conceptual question ‘What is boxing?’ and biologists barely ask ‘What is Biology?’. For them, this kind of question is a higher order question which concerns the nature of the thing in itself. It is an external question for most disciplines. But for philosophy, the question concerning the nature of philosophy is an internal question. Self-awareness is a sine qua non of doing philosophy.With such a long history and so many traditions, the method of doing philosophy must be miscellaneous. My thesis attempts to contribute to the discussion of philosophical methodology by proposing a method I shall call conceptual tuning. Conceptual tuning is grounded in the philosophical method of conceptual engineering, advocates of which endeavor to improve our concepts. According to the method of conceptual engineering, philosophical problems stem from defects in our understanding of concepts, and it is the philosopher’s task to fix them. While most conceptual engineering approaches only narrowly focus on the perspective of ‘repairing’ or ‘fixing’, conceptual tuning calls for attention to the ‘expressive’ perspective. In other words, we should put this method in the broad framework of the practice of asking for and giving reasons. In this thesis, I also attempt to explain some previous conceptual methods under the title of conceptual tuning, such as Brandomian method, ordinary language philosophy, and the traditional conceptual analyses.

This dissertation is an attempt and, if you will, a temptation to engage with the ‘disturbing’ prospect of the truth of skepticism. All of Stanley Cavell’s works refer to the truth of skepticism, and yet the discourse surrounding this concept is sparse and often engaged minimally. The truth of skepticism is that “the human creature’s basis in the world as a whole, its relation to the world as such, is not that of knowing, anyway not what we think of as knowing” (The Claim of Reason, p.241). In order to make sense of what he means by what “we think of as knowing” Cavell provides a philosophical framework in which to understand skepticism and what it threatens: through his notion of “criteria” taken from Ludwig Wittgenstein; the concept of the “ordinary” derived from the works of J.L. Austin; and the “search for community” as a problem of “acknowledgement” or “avoidance” as opposed to a problem of knowledge. I argue that the “standard” (Stephen Mulhall’s) reading of Cavell fails to fully account for the truth of skepticism and I propose reading Cavell as a Nietzschean Versucher – one who attempts and searches endlessly, never fully embracing any particular view. By reading Cavell in this way, I explore how to do genuine philosophy and consider how to address the role of traditional epistemological problems in the face of Cavell’s framework. Beyond the traditional philosophical questions of skepticism, I address how the theoretical musings of the first half of the dissertation can be used in practice – or one could say how they reflect on the ordinary. Following Cavell, I connect philosophy and art as sister disciplines concerned with similar problems such as epistemological skepticism itself. To show these connections I analyze two plays and three films: Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale and Othello, alongside The Philadelphia Story (1940), Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004), and Her (2013). By engaging these pieces with Cavell’s philosophical framework in mind, I show how sexual jealousy is a form of living one’s skepticism in a real context that cannot be so easily dismissed by philosophers who claim that skepticism is somehow empty, confused, or nonsense. By showing how the threat of skepticism is a part of our ordinary lives, I conclude by considering how we might recover from our skepticism. Skepticism is not the end, it is the beginning.

This essay sets out to examine my own practical knowledge as a socioculturally inspired preschool teacher conditioned by a capitalist ideology. Louis Althusser’s concept of ideology,as something reproduced by daily human actions, is used and the focus rests on language, or rather language use, especially in relation to the ‘autistic child’ as met in the preschool context. The analysis is supported by two specific traditions of thought: ordinary language philosophy – represented foremostly by Ludwig Wittgenstein, Stanley Cavell and Cora Diamond – and Marxist psychoanalysis, as particularly developed by Slavoj Žižek. The overall conclusion is that the preschool’s practical treatment of the autistic child can be read as a reaction to both ideological resistance and ideological disclosure. The autistic child is interpreted as representing a certain kind of imagination which is considered a threat in the capitalist/sociocultural preschool discourse. A discourse whose conditional criteria the essay also more thoroughly aims to uncover, using said traditions of thought.

Cette thèse cherche à reconstituer les bases philosophiques de la pensée juridique de H.L.A. Hart (1907-1992), figure majeure du positivisme juridique anglo-saxon au XXe siècle, et professeur de jurisprudence à l'université d'Oxford de 1952 à 1968. Ses travaux demeurent largement méconnus en France.Dégager les sources philosophiques du « positivisme analytique » de Hart permettra, premièrement, de reconstruire le dialogue entre le juriste d'Oxford et certaines figures importantes de la théorie du droit continentale. Hart oppose d’importantes critiques à certaines formes continentales de positivisme juridique, comme le normativisme de Hans Kelsen ou le réalisme scandinave d'Alf Ross. Cependant, cette thèse montrera également qu'il est possible d'établir des rapprochements étroits entre la pensée de Hart et celle du juriste francophone Chaïm Perelman. L'étude des bases philosophiques de la pensée juridique de Hart offre ainsi des points de contact intéressants entre ces différentes cultures juridiques.Deuxièmement, cette thèse cherche à faire ressortir l'influence déterminante de la philosophie du langage ordinaire qui se développa à Oxford au lendemain de la Seconde Guerre mondiale. Notre propos s'appuiera notamment sur un « premier corpus » de textes philosophiques publiés avant son accession à la chaire de jurisprudence en 1952, ainsi que sur les travaux préparatoires à son ouvrage The Concept of Law (1961). Nous défendons l'idée que ses prises de position philosophiques se retrouvent dans sa réflexion juridique et permettent de comprendre la cohérence de son œuvre, ainsi que la forme d'empirisme juridique qui sous-tend sa conception de la notion de Constitution. / This thesis bears on the implicit epistemology and methodological considerations underlying the legal philosophy of H.L.A. Hart (1907-1992), the major representative of XXth century legal positivism in the English speaking world, and Oxford chair of jurisprudence (1952-1968). His work remains little known in France.We will seek to answer the view that Hart might not really have been durably influenced by ordinary language philosophy. We will address these questions by examining a corpus of earlier (overlooked) articles which he published as a young Oxford linguistic philosopher. This “early work” consists of the articles which Hart published before he in was elected to the Oxford chair of jurisprudence. Our view is that the work in general philosophy which he did in this early period is crucial to understand some of the positions which he defends in his legal writings. This thesis will thus show that Hart was active in the epistemological debate opposing the Oxford philosophers and the British representatives of logical atomism and logical empiricism. It will also show that these early positions are carried over into his later jurisprudence, including his major work The Concept of Law (1961).Shedding light on these philosophical foundations of Hart’s legal theory will ultimately allow us to reconstruct the debate opposing his own “analytical positivism” and Continental forms of positivism, such as Hans Kelsen’s normativism or Alf Ross Scandinavian legal realism. It will also allow us to draw important parallels between Hartian legal theory and that of the francophone philosopher Chaïm Perelman.