Open Access Kent State (OAKS)

The article discusses Stanley Cavell and his concept of skepticism. Stanley Cavell describes one of the fundamental lessons of skepticism, as the familiar challenge to the possibility of certainty or knowledge that emerges as a methodological tendency in modern thought. In elucidating the historical and continuing impulse to doubt in a range of examples drawn from philosophy, literature, and cinema, Cavell argues that skepticism reveals the loss of transcendental necessity, the kind of metaphysical guarantee that traditionally grounded linguistic meaning in a one-to-one correspondence between words and the objects. For Cavell, modernity appears as an epoch where transcendental securities have irretrievably disappeared.