This research aimed to explore the narratives of romantic jealousy in the context of infidelity for heterosexual and homosexual men from Johannesburg South Africa. This study takes on a qualitative approach using a narrative analysis in combination with a structural and thematic content analysis. The narratives of the heterosexual and homosexual men revealed the role which jealousy plays in every relationship, and how it can affect the emotions and behaviours of both partners. This study found that the narratives of these men were in contradiction to what evolutionary theories as well as past research on the topic have suggested. Evolutionary perspectives propose that heterosexual men are more inclided to sexual infidelity, this was however found to be in contradiction to the beliefs and ideas held by the participants of this study. Heterosexual participants of this study reported that for them emotional infidelity would be more jealousy provoking, as it would be a sure indication that the relationship would end. Past research findings on the other hand have suggested that homosexual males are more inclined to emotional infidelity, as they do not face the risk of cuckholdry. However the same can not be said for the narratives of the homosexual participants of this study. The narrative of all except for one homosexual participant indicated that homosexual men felt that they would be greatly affected by sexual infidelity rather than emotional infidelity. There explanations revolved around the open ended nature and ease of access to sex which is prevalent in the gay community. It is also important to note that simmilarly to the heterosexual group, most of the participnats who experienced sexual jealousy also experienced sexual infidelity. Indicating a link between the type of infidelity you experience to the type of jealousy you feel. This research identified that heterosexual participants felt that in their live stories they found emotional jealousy to be the worst apsect of infidelity while homosexual men felt that sexual jealousy was the worst aspect of infidelity.

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.