T his paper sets out to strengthen a connection that, since the publication of my first writings on the concept of care, I have sought to establish between the ethics of care and my own philosophical background and ground—ordinary language philosophy as represented by Ludwig Wittgenstein, J. L. Austin, and Stanley Cavell—and thus to find in ordinary language philosophy (OLP), often considered to be disconnected from gender issues (except through speech act theory), resources for a reformulation of what for me is at stake in feminism: the inclusion and empowerment of women’s voices and expressiveness (and that means ALL women), and attention to their experience.

Les éthiques du care , en proposant de valoriser des caractéristiques morales d’abord identifiées comme féminines, ont introduit des enjeux éthiques dans le politique, et mis la vulnérabilité au cœur de la réflexion morale. En cela, elles ont affaibli, par une critique de la théorie de la justice, le lien entre éthique de la justice et libéralisme politique, et rejoignent des éthiques qu’on pourrait appeler « wittgensteiniennes ». Mais elles permettent aussi, par l’attention qu’elles prônent à la vie humaine ordinaire, de créer un nouvel espace de la réflexion politique, que nous définissons ici comme une politique de l’ordinaire dans la lignée de la « philosophie analytique de la politique » que proposait Foucault. Il s’agit alors de mettre en évidence le lien entre notre manque d’attention à des réalités négligées et le manque de théorisation qui les affecte.

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(cloth). Reviewed by Derek A. McDougall Originally published in French in the year 2000, the English version of Sandra Laugier's short book of 10 Chapters plus an Introduction and Conclusion, has a 7 page Preface, 9 pages of Notes, a brief Bibliography and 121 pages of actual text. The reading of Wittgenstein and Austin that she provides is distinctly Cavellian in character. Indeed, Stanley Cavell in a dust-cover quote, remarks that her work is already influential in France and Italy, exciting as it does a new interest in 'language conceived not only as a cognitive capacity but also as used, and meant, as part of our form of life'. Cavell goes on to say that this new translation is not merely welcome but indispensable, and has at least the capacity to alter prevailing views about the philosophy of language, so affecting what we have come to think of as the 'analytic-continental divide'. Toril Moi of Duke Uni., in another dust-cover quote, states that Laugier's reading of Wittgenstein-Austin-Cavell shows how their claim that 'to speak about language is to speak about the world is an antimetaphysical revolution in philosophy that tranforms our understanding of epistemology and ethics.' She concludes with the thought that anyone who wishes to understand what 'ordinary language philosophy' means today should read this book. This is a large claim to make, and anyone who is inclined to read Wittgenstein and Austin strictly in their own terms, and with their own avowed intentions-where discernible-steadily in view, is almost bound to conclude that it is simply not true. 'Ordinary Language Philosophy', as we take that term to apply to the work of a wide range of philosophers who operated, primarily from Oxford, during the 1950's and 1960's, was always a rather broad church. Consequently, a detailed investigation of the role played by 'ordinary language' or 'the ordinary use of language' in their philosophical work is required if we are even to approach some understanding of how 'the ordinary use of words' could be employed to undermine what a number of these thinkers thought of as the conceptual confusions or misunderstandings underlying at least some of 'the traditional problems of philosophy' (1). 1 Nevertheless, this point is quite independent of the light that a Cavellian reading can throw on the work of Wittgenstein and Austin. Laugier is adamant, for example, that from his earliest writings, Cavell was rejected by the partisans of what she refers to as a 'real' science of language, e.g., Katz and Fodor, those who in later years turned to a cognitivist understanding of linguistic functioning, because they misunderstood 'the problematic nature of our relationship to language and of my position as a subject of common language' (Ibid.,114). This point is intimately connected to Cavell's unique and unusual notion of scepticism, which in his seminal essay 'The Availability of Wittgenstein's Later Philosophy', is captured in the thought that following the teaching of words in their particular contexts of use, their projec...

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