Against “Finitude”

How Understanding That We Are Not Only Finite Beings Can Help Cure Both Skepticism and Its Discontents

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.