Conversations 

Abstract: In an earlier essay, I once drew a comparison between Theodor W. Adorno’s remark that, “philosophy, which once appeared obsolete, sustains itself because the moment for its actualization has been lost,” and Stanley Cavell’s suggestion that Ludwig Wittgenstein’s “Investigations can be seen as a philosophy of culture, one that relates itself to its time as a time in which the continuation of philosophy is at stake.” In this essay, I’d like to compare Adorno’s remark to a different but related remark of Cavell’s, namely his thought that “philosophy ends in a recovery from a terminable loss.” He pursues this thought in remarks on Emerson, noting that “philosophy begins in loss, in finding yourself at a loss, as Wittgenstein more or less says.” Many different traditions—Marxism, American transcendentalism, ordinary language philosophy, just to name a few—animate these thoughts. This is not the place to detail and tease out the ramifications and significances of each; instead, I want to take this very short essay merely to raise a different point of relation than I raised before (in a deep way, then, this essay—and especially its short length—may be seen as a sort of afterword to my earlier remarks).

Abstract: In this essay, I seek to follow and draw upon resources in Ludwig Wittgenstein (and in an important contemporary follower of his, Iain McGilchrist) in order to pose a radical question. I question here the conventional “wisdom” across philosophical traditions (and cleaved to equally strongly by Cavell and Derrida, and for that matter by Richard Dawkins and Donald Davidson), that says—or rather even, simply assumes—that we are finite beings.

Abstract: The tenth issue of Conversations takes as its starting point the mutually expressed importance of the intellectual relationship and friendship between Stanley Cavell and the historian of science Thomas Kuhn. Their dialogue is all the more striking given that both thinkers were as concerned with difficulties of communication as with its achievement. Yet there is no hint of a struggle with incommensurability in Kuhn’s claim that Cavell was “the only person with whom I have been able to explore my ideas in incomplete sentences.” Cavell likewise explained, in The Claim of Reason, that the work owed much to having been “at times almost in possession of the something you might call an intellectual community” while working with Kuhn at Berkeley. This issue springs from these conversations between Cavell and Kuhn, exploring and extending their encounters through readings which cross Cavell with Kuhn and Kuhn with Cavell, and in so doing extending our understanding of each, while also illustrating the ways in which their work can still provide inspiration for grappling with science, art, and philosophy.

Abstract: When we refer to something as automatic in ordinary language, we tend to speak of it as unconscious and working by itself —machinic, repetitive, needing no intervention or control from others to move along its natural course. If a process is automatic, we regularly assume that it happens independently of the human will. What is automated, in other words, will go on until non-human physical constraints prevent it from further labor, such as when the battery is dead in the robot or when the electricity goes out as the washing machine is running its usual course, or when one of its parts is worn out and needs repair. But if the machine “decides” that it is too tired or having a moody afternoon and wants to stop working mid-way through a task, we can’t help feeling very alarmed. Usually, we see automatism as precluding autonomy. Its automatic nature seems to suggest that it is, or ought to be, heteronomous in the sense that its course of action remains the same until it is told otherwise, e.g., when someone else turns the switch on or off. The contrast between the two statuses is prevalent in philosophical discourses as well, notably Descartes’ thought experiment that an automaton designed to look like an animal would be hard to distinguish from the real thing, but a machine that imitates humans would be far easier to detect, due to the latter’s language and general reasoning abilities, which reflect the fact that it is guided by immaterial mind.