Cavell on Skepticism and the Importance of Not-Knowing

Abstract

In an early essay Cavell set his sights on trying to make Wittgenstein’s philosophy available to Anglo-American philosophy in the first decade after the publication of Philosophical Investigations when it was hard to see what Wittgenstein was up to through the haze of logical positivism, linguistic conventionalism and American pragmatism. In this paper I would like to make an analogous attempt to make Cavell’s philosophy available to Anglo-American philosophy against a perception of it as being slighted, missed, or avoided in contemporary philosophical discussion.