[...]... another symposium in Philosophy and Literature (27/1 (April 2003)), entitled Wittgenstein and Literary Aesthetics It appeared there as ‘On Philosophy as Therapy: Wittgenstein, Cavell, and Autobiographical Writing’, and versions of it were presented in San Francisco as part of a session, Wittgenstein and the Arts’, at an annual meeting of the American Society for Aesthetics, and at the Seventh Annual Comparative... particular dualistic picture of autobiographical self-investigation Peter Lewis was kind enough to ask for a contribution to his collection Wittgenstein, Philosophy, and the Arts (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004) and flexible enough quickly to accept and encourage my idea for a paper; this resulted in ‘The Self, Thinking: Wittgenstein, Augustine, and the Autobiographical Situation’ and has become the first two... contact with each other, and to develop a Wittgensteininspired account (I am being very brief here: a better term than ‘account’ might be ‘conceptual clarification’) of each; and to help show, over the book’s course, some small part of the value of interweaving questions of subjectivity and selfhood with both autobiographical and autobiographically significant writings on the one hand and a therapeutic, nonscientistic... Legacy particular and sometimes quite subtle linguistic forces that influence, to a greater extent than we often realize, our thinking about the self and self-description Then standing back and taking them all together offers a way of understanding autobiographical writing and self-descriptive language very unlike the deeply entrenched and seemingly more intuitive Cartesian model and its derivatives—a... write for his collection Literature and Philosophy: A Guide to Contemporary Debates (London: Palgrave, 2005) The project, as it unfolded, became Autobiographical Memory: Wittgenstein, Davidson, and the ‘‘Descent into Ourselves ’ ’, and now constitutes the first two sections of Chapter 8 David also kindly invited me to take part in a conference entitled Wittgenstein and Literature’ that he organized... Legacy 1 Autobiographical Consciousness 1 Schopenhauer, Wittgenstein s Transition, and the Edge of Solipsism 2 The ‘Inner Picture’ 3 Real Privacy (and Hidden Content) 2 The Self, Reflected 1 Observing Consciousness 2 The Picture of Metaphysical Seclusion 3 Cavell and the Stage of Speech 3 The Self, Speaking 1 A Behaviorist in Disguise? 2 First-Person Avowals 3 Real Introspection (and Kierkegaard’s Seducer)... Augustine and the Autobiographical Situation 3 Wittgenstein Underground (and Dostoevsky’s Notes) 5 The Question of True Self-Interpretation 1 Meaning in Retrospect 2 The Pain and the Piano 3 Augustine in Retrospect 1 15 16 25 33 44 45 54 59 76 77 89 97 119 119 132 140 154 158 163 175 xviii Contents 6 The Uniqueness of Person-Perception 1 The Case of Goethe 2 The Mind Shown: Leonardo, Rembrandt, and Mimetic... Actors 3 Iris Murdoch, the ‘Unfrozen Past’, and Seeing in a New Light 7 Rethinking Self-Interpretation 1 Autobiographical Memory 2 The ‘Descent into Ourselves 3 On Philosophy as Therapy: Wittgenstein, Cavell, and Autobiographical Writing Index 185 187 196 202 223 224 231 240 259 Introduction: Confronting the Cartesian Legacy The voluminous writings of Ludwig Wittgenstein contain some of the most profound... language and mind for our understanding and clarification of particularly self-descriptive or autobiographical language; to turn to autobiographical writing as a valuable and heretofore little-explored resource for the philosophy of literature (taking these writings, themselves the best examples we have of human selves exploring themselves, in the light of issues in the philosophy of language and mind);... organized entitled Wittgenstein, Language, and Perception’ at the University of Aix-en-Provence, was published as ‘The Self, Speaking: Wittgenstein, Introspective Utterances, and the Arts of Self-Representation’ Seeing throughout the history of philosophy a number of misconstruals and simplifications—misleading pictures—the mind has made of its own workings, and seeing the force of Wittgenstein s undercuttings .