| When Wittgenstein claims that a man who knows that it will either rain or not rain knows nothing about the weather, he's not just providing an example of a prioricity. He is also registering a complaint about a certain philosophical tradition, a tradition which speaks in a formal language unconcerned with reference to an external world. My dissertation examines a similar complaint running through one incarnation of Anglo-American modernism. I argue that writers like Virginia Woolf and Ezra Pound exhibit their own anxieties about forms that fail to connect to the world, and develop their aesthetic visions in an effort to alleviate those anxieties. From Woolf's confronting "fear itself" in the random shadow on a cinema screen, to Pound's notion of a "true and proper name" that's an intrinsic part of a visible natural order, these writers contemplate models of experience in which psychological states like naming, knowing, and valuing are not products of some inner realm of mind but literal, tangible objects in the external world. In this respect, I believe their efforts anticipate in structure and spirit the work of contemporary philosophers like Saul Kripke, Hillary Putnam, and John McDowell, who move away from the traditional understanding of mental life toward an externalist view of the mind--a view in which "the mind," to borrow McDowell's words, "is not in the head."... |
