Voice as Form of Life and Life Form

• Main Author: Sandra Laugier
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Nordic Wittgenstein Society 2015-10-01
• Series: Nordic Wittgenstein Review
• Online Access: http://www.nordicwittgensteinreview.com/article/view/3364

This paper studies the concept of form of life as central to ordinary language philosophy (as understood in Wittgenstein’s, Austin’s and Stanley Cavell’s work): philosophy of our language as spoken; pronounced by a human voice within a form of life. Such an approach to Wittgenstein’s later philosophy shifts the question of the common use of language – central to Wittgenstein’s Investigations – to the definition of the subject as voice, and to the reinvention of subjectivity in language. The voice is both a subjective and common expression: it is what makes it possible for my individual voice, or claim, to become shared and for our forms of life to be intertwined with a lifeform.