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Naturalism, Relativism, and Skepticism Kevin M Towards a Philosophical Anthropology of Culture “Anyone interested in the relationship between naturalism and relativism in the philosophy of social science or the philosophy of culture should read this insightful and original book.” – David G. Stern, University of Iowa This book explores the question of what it means to be a human being through sustained and original analyses of three important philosophical topics: relativism, skepticism, and naturalism in the social sciences. Kevin M. Cahill’s approach involves an original employment of historical and ethnographic material that is both conceptual and empirical in order to address relevant philosophical issues. Specifically, while Cahill avoids interpretative debates, he develops an approach to philosophical critique based on Cora Diamond’s and James Conant’s work on the early Wittgenstein. This makes possible the use of a concept of culture that avoids the dogmatism that not only typifies traditional metaphysics but also frequently mars arguments from ordinary language or phenomenology. This is especially crucial for the third part of the book, which involves a cultural-historical critique of the ontology of the self in Stanley Cavell’s work on skepticism. In pursuing this strategy, the book also mounts a novel and timely defense of the interpretivist tradition in the philosophy of the social sciences. Towards a Philosophical Anthropology of Culture will be of interest to researchers working on the philosophy of the social sciences, Wittgenstein, and philosophical anthropology. Kevin M. Cahill is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Bergen, Norway. He works mainly on Wittgenstein’s philosophy and philosophy of the social sciences. His publications include The Fate of Wonder: Wittgenstein’s Critique of Metaphysics and Modernity (2011) and Wittgenstein and Naturalism (Routledge, 2018). Routledge Studies in Contemporary Philosophy Toleration and Challenges to Liberalism Edited by Johannes Drerup and Gottfried Schweiger The Philosophy of Reenchantment Edited by Michael Meijer and Herbert De Vriese Caring for Liberalism Dependency and Liberal Political Theory Edited by Asha Bhandary and Amy R. Baehr Language and Phenomenology Edited by Chad Engelland The Philosophy and Psychology of Ambivalence Being of Two Minds Edited by Berit Brogaard and Dimitria Electra Gatzia Concepts in Thought, Action, and Emotion New Essays Edited by Christoph Demmerling and Dirk Schröder Towards a Philosophical Anthropology of Culture Naturalism, Relativism, and Skepticism Kevin M. Cahill Examples and Their Role in Our Thinking Ondřej Beran Extimate Technology Self-Formation in a Technological World Ciano Aydin For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/ Routledge-Studies-in-Contemporary-Philosophy/book-series/SE0720 Towards a Philosophical Anthropology of Culture Naturalism, Relativism, and Skepticism Kevin M. Cahill First published 2021 by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2021 Kevin M. Cahill The right of Kevin M. Cahill to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. The Open Access version of this book, available at www. taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Cahill, Kevin M. (Professor of Philosophy), author. Title: Towards a philosophical anthropology of culture : naturalism, relativism, and skepticism / Kevin M. Cahill. Description: New York, NY : Routledge, 2021. | Series: Routledge studies in contemporary philosophy | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2020045005 (print) | LCCN 2020045006 (ebook) | ISBN 9780367637156 (hardback) | ISBN 9781003120841 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Philosophical anthropology. | Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 1889–1951. | Naturalism. | Skepticism. | Relativity. | Social sciences—Philosophy. | Culture—Philosophy. Classification: LCC BD450 .C2236 2021 (print) | LCC BD450 (ebook) | DDC 128—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020045005 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020045006 ISBN: 978-0-367-63715-6 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-12084-1 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by Apex CoVantage, LLC To philosophy’s forgotten somewheres Contents Preface and Acknowledgements viii Introduction 1 1 Lost in the Ancient City: Pluralist Naturalism and the Philosophy of the Social Sciences 13 2 The Grammar of Conflict 53 3 Skepticism and the Human Condition 73 Appendix: Wittgenstein’s Paganism 163 Bibliography 177 Index 183 Preface and Acknowledgements In the preface to The Fate of Wonder: Wittgenstein’s Critique of Meta- physics and Modernity, I singled out Hubert Dreyfus and Cora Diamond for special thanks for much of the philosophical inspiration behind that book. The present work will make evident that I am still much indebted to them, whatever distances there may be between their views and mine. Some of my institutional debts remain unchanged since the time of the publication of the earlier monograph. This is not surprising since, as the Introduction makes clear, much of the work for the two publications overlapped. Thus, thanks once again to the Department of Philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley, where I was a Visiting Scholar for the 2005–2006 academic year; Professor Carla Frecerro, Director of the Center for Cultural Studies at U.C. Santa Cruz, for her hospitality dur- ing my stay as Resident Scholar for Winter and Spring Quarters, 2009. I would also like to express my gratitude to Professor Paul Roth, then chair at the Department of Philosophy at U.C. Santa Cruz for being a welcoming host for my research stay as a Visiting Scholar during the Winter and Spring Quarters, 2011. Finally, I owe a special thanks to Pro- fessor Mark Risjord at the Department of Philosophy, Emory University, for hosting my stint as a Visiting Scholar for the 2019–2020 academic year. Risjord was generous in the extreme with the time he set aside for philosophical discussions, which I hugely enjoyed and profited from. Finally, I would like to thank my colleague Dr. Rolf Scott of the Depart- ment of Social Anthropology at the University of Bergen. In addition to years of lively discussions, there is one incident that deserves special mention. My earliest conception of the third essay in this volume was that it would primarily be an exploration of Cavell’s views on skepti- cism in terms of comparative epistemology. During a presentation of my main ideas for the essay many years ago, Scott pointed out to me that the project would be better framed in terms of the comparative ontology of the subject. This suggestion ended up being a turning point for that work. Much of the Appendix has already appeared as in Mark Bevir and Andrius Galisanka, eds. Wittgenstein and Normative Inquiry (Leiden: Brill, 2016) 174–191. I am grateful to the publisher for permission to reprint this material. Introduction Kevin M. Cahill I. An Uneven Start The impetus for this book comes from the last chapter of my disserta- tion, The Moral Dimension of Wittgenstein’s Thought, defended at the University of Virginia in August of 2001. In the fourth and final chapter, called “The Disengaged View and ‘The Darkness of this Time’ ”, I argued, based on both textual and extra-textual support, that the remarks on rule- following in Philosophical Investigations constituted a kind of cultural critique of modernity qua critique of what Charles Taylor has termed “the disengaged view” of human practice.1 Part of my aim there was to make plausible that Wittgenstein saw the problems of Western metaphysics in a substantially historical light. Accordingly, my discussion involved a critique of Stanley Cavell’s view that for Wittgenstein, the impulse to skepticism (for Cavell synonymous with metaphysics) is part of the human condition. Especially relevant for the chapter was Cavell’s essay “Declining Decline: Wittgenstein as a Philosopher of Culture”, where he in effect claimed that by concluding that Wittgenstein saw philosophical problems as primarily rooted in our way of life, historicist oriented commentators such as G.H. von Wright had given short shrift to universalist strains in Wittgenstein’s anthropology. Von Wright had claimed that for Wittgenstein, Because of the interlocking of language and ways of life, a disorder in the former reflects a disorder in the latter. If philosophical prob- lems are symptomatic of language producing malignant outgrowths which obscure our thinking, then there must be a cancer in the Leb- ensweise, the way of life itself.2 In reasserting his signature humanist interpretation of Wittgenstein, Cavell distinguished between what he called an “ethnological” or “hori- zontal” sense of Lebensform in Wittgenstein’s work and what he termed a “vertical” or “biological” sense of that expression.3 Responding specifi- cally to the previous passage, Cavell writes, Given my sense of two directions in the idea of a form of life, von Wright’s appeal here to “a cancer in the way of life” makes me 2 Introduction uneasy. “Way of Life” again to me sounds too exclusively social,
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