Abstract

Abstract:Can I (and you) talk sensibly about William Shakespeare's works? Some historicists see insuperable barriers in trying to understand utterances from different times and cultures, and some skeptics see such barriers in trying to read other minds. In Ludwig Wittgenstein's famous utterance about not understanding a talking lion, is the early modern Englishman Shakespeare one of those lions? Or can a magic key see past such barriers in one of the critical systems that we are offered? I argue that the answer to both questions is no.