Stanley Cavell Quotes on Knowledge

Stanley Cavell (1926–2018), the American philosopher whose The Claim of Reason (1979), Must We Mean What We Say? (1969), and the long subsequent corpus on Wittgenstein, Austin, Hollywood comedy, and Emerson gave late-twentieth-century Anglophone philosophy one of its most distinctive voices, defended the case that skepticism is not a philosophical mistake to be refuted but a permanent human possibility whose acknowledgment is itself the work of ordinary-language philosophy. The framework treats Wittgenstein's later writings as the patient exhibition of the conditions under which everyday cognitive practices are sustained, with the consequent reading of skepticism as the philosopher's recoil from the fact that those conditions are humanly fragile and humanly inherited rather than metaphysically grounded.