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  • Prefatory Note
  • Hent de Vries

On April 15, 2015, the Humanities Center at Johns Hopkins was fortunate to host an international interdisciplinary workshop on Practices of the Ordinary with distinguished visitors and esteemed colleagues, whose contributions we reproduce below in the dossier with the same title. Nothing is less obvious than the notion (“the ordinary”) in question and theoretical reflection on its practices, if one can say so, is as deeply diverse and conceptually challenging as these everyday practices themselves. We know that the turn to the ordinary, as conceived by Ludwig Wittgenstein and J.L. Austin and dramatically reconceived by Stanley Cavell with the help of Ralph Waldo Emerson and David Henry Thoreau, early and modern tragedy, comedy and Hollywood, is—for all its invocation of “the common” and “the low”—hardly a concern with banality and triviality, much less worldliness or profanity. As the late Hilary Putnam pointedly reminds us:

Ordinary does not mean going to the post office and mailing a letter, it means faith that the way we think and live isn’t all a fiction or an illusion, that the illusion is rather all these tremendous intellectual constructions that make the way we think and live look like an illusion. This is what Wittgenstein was trying to make room for. Just as Marx turned Hegel’s world upside down, today Wittgenstein would think that the philosophers and the literary theorists have the world upside down.”1

(Qtd. in Barradori 67)

But what would ‘making room’ or turning upside down what has, apparently, already been turned upside down mean, philosophically and practically? What, precisely, could stand opposed to banality and triviality, worldliness and the profane, and their supposed counterpart, the overly theoretical—indeed, all too lofty and metaphysical—obsession with “fiction and illusion”? What, if anything, would be its alternative or contrast? Further, what “faith” (to use, once again, Putnam’s own terminology) is required such that all we face or do will be neither fiction nor illusion? To answer these questions, our contributors were asked to analyze the practices of ordinary and the everyday in light [End Page v] of their functional contrast, where no contrasting pole seems easily available. The editors thank those who participated for their kind willingness to publish their contributions in the pages below.

WORK CITED

Borradori, Giovanna The American Philosopher: Conversations with Quine, Davidson, Putnam, Nozick, Danto, Rorty, Cavell, MacIntyre, and Kuhn (Chicago and London: U of Chicago P, 1994). [End Page vi]
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