Some readers of the Tractatus claim that, for Wittgenstein, the correct philosophical method is “a method of logical analysis in terms of a symbolic logical notation, whereby the logical, syntactical or formal properties of logically unclear expressions are clarified by translating them into a logically perspicuous notation” (Kuusela 2019, p. 85). This chapter aims at refuting this view, maintaining that Wittgenstein distinguishes between logical analysis and philosophical clarification. More precisely, I would like to establish that, drawing on certain features of Russellian logical practice (as illustrated for instance in On Denoting), Wittgenstein makes a distinction between logically ordered language and completely analyzed language. For him, philosophical clarification does not consist in an analysis of ordinary language but in the visible manifestation (at the level of signs) of the logical ordering of its symbols.

Must We Mean What We Say? is the first and only work in contemporary thought to carry the project of ordinary language philosophy through to its end. It thereby confronts and overcomes the harsh criticisms of ordinary language philosophy that began with Gellner’s attack in 1959, belying repeated claims that the tradition is “dead.” MWM shows that ordinary language philosophy is more than ever alive and relevant. Cavell’s emphasis on the “voice of the ordinary” responds to the risk of skepticism, that loss of or distancing from the world that film also explores (see The World Viewed). In Must We Mean What We Say?, Cavell offers us new ways to explore the relation between an individual speaker and her community, the possibility of revolution in philosophy, and the sense in which our relation to our own words figures our relations to ourselves: the question of self-knowledge and voice.

Instead of taking the impossibility of certain knowledge in experience as an intellectual problem, Cavell understands it as an existential condition. Philosophers have traditionally disavowed that condition by turning skepticism into an intellectual problem. The pathology behind that disavowal becomes the center of what Krebs calls Cavell’s “clinical turn.” The philosophical criticism resulting from that turn involves a radical change in attitude, where thinking is – as Cavell puts it – a mode of praise. This essay argues that thinking as praise makes receptiveness paramount, and requires a reconnection with feeling and passion that brings the body back into philosophy.

In "Aesthetic Problems of Modern Philosophy" Cavell draws together Wittgenstein’s philosophical procedures and the grammar of aesthetic judgment as Kant articulates it in the "Third Critique." Cavell primarily focuses on the universal voice. But there is an internal relation between the four different moments, and in particular, I would argue, between the second and the fourth, in which Kant shows aesthetic judgment to presuppose a common sense.

The relation between the universal voice and common sense is articulated in terms of a polarity of expression and ground. The expressive pole in aesthetic judgment is most evident in acts of criticism of art in which, judging with a universal voice, one takes oneself to be representative. But it is equally important that this expression be of a natural ground that underlies our common existence in language. The ground we stand on in judging is not a position, but rather a form of life in common. I end my chapter with an analysis of Cavell’s surprising turn to Wittgenstein’s Tractatus to illuminate this recognition of a ground of attunement, a common world that can be called my world, in and through our judgments of art.

The revolutionary significance of Must We Mean What We Say?, Stanley Cavell’s first book and the best introduction to his thought, becomes increasingly evident fifty years after its publication, confronting us with newly relevant, transformative thinking about modernism, the idea of culture, ordinary language philosophy, the history of twentieth-century analytic philosophy, American philosophy, the 1960s, Wittgenstein, Rawls, Kant, Kierkegaard, Beckett, Shakespeare, and such eternal philosophical themes as truth, passion, utterance, self-knowledge, skepticism, and the value of criticism. Cavell’s intervention in ordinary language philosophy revolutionized its practice, overcoming its dogmas and challenging the analytic tradition from within, broadening its audiences. His focus on self-confrontation as central to philosophical practice, the shepherding of ordinary utterances into uses within forms of life, shows that the philosophical preconditions of democratic thinking lie in the embedding of meaning in everyday life, rooted in the ethical and aesthetic aspects of how we mean what we say.