Cavell vs. Wittgenstein on the Body-Mind Problem

Abstract:With the ideas of skepticism and acknowledgment that he broached in Must We Mean What We Say? and The Claim of Reason, Stanley Cavell put a lasting imprint on the literary reception of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations. In the wake of these books, it became standard practice to take Cavell’s reading as a reliable guide to this difficult text, or even to claim that in confronting Cavell, one confronts Wittgenstein. But the conflation of Wittgenstein’s thought with Cavell’s requires us to underplay or completely ignore what Garry L. Hagberg has called a Cartesian “ conceptual undertow” in Cavell—an undertow present in Wittgenstein only as a philosophy-induced malady of thought.