Abstract

The article argues that, in some crucial passages of his work of the Sixties and Seventies, and especially in Parts One and Four of The Claim of Reason, Stanley Cavell reinterprets topics from Wittgenstein’s later philosophy through the lens of the ideas and more generally a conception of the human extrapolated from Heidegger’s Being and Time. Intertwining conceptual, contextual and genetic analysis, the article focuses in particular on Cavell’s understanding of the notions of criteria, acknowledgment, world, forms of life, avoidance, finitude, expression, private language and anxiety. Attention is paid to the divergences between the meta-philosophical assumptions of Wittgenstein and Heidegger, and the significance of Cavell’s partial shift from the first to the second in the elaboration of his own humanistic idea of philosophy. It is also suggested that his existential reinterpretation of Wittgenstein’s therapeutic conception of philosophy is the core intuition behind the notion of perfectionism that interested Cavell from the late Eighties onwards