Stanley Cavell
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Stanley Louis Cavell (born September 1, 1926) is an American philosopher. He is the Walter M. Cabot Professor Emeritus of Aesthetics and the General Theory of Value at Harvard University.
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[edit] Life
Born to a Jewish family in Atlanta, Georgia, Cavell was first trained in music, graduating with a Bachelor of Arts in music from the University of California, Berkeley in 1947. Currently, Cavell resides in Brookline, Massachusetts.
[edit] Philosophy
Although trained in the Anglo-American analytic tradition, Cavell often engages in dialogue with the continental tradition. He is well known for his inclusion of film and literary study into philosophical inquiry.
Cavell has written extensively on Ludwig Wittgenstein and Martin Heidegger, as well as on the American Transcendentalists Henry Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson. He has been associated with an approach to Wittgenstein sometimes known as the New Wittgenstein.
[edit] Works
[edit] Must We Mean What We Say?
Cavell first established his distinct philosophical identity with a collection of essays, entitled Must We Mean What We Say? (1969), a work which addresses topics such as language use, metaphor, skepticism, tragedy, and literary interpretation, with a view to ordinary language philosophy, a school of which he is a practitioner and ardent defender.
[edit] The Claim of Reason
Cavell is perhaps best known for his book, The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality, and Tragedy (1979), which forms the centerpiece of his work, and which has its origins in his doctoral dissertation.
[edit] Cities of Words
In Cities of Words (2004) Cavell traces the history of moral perfectionism, a mode of moral thinking spanning the history of Western philosophy and literature. Having previously used Emerson to define the concept, this book suggests ways we might want to understand philosophy, literature, and film as preoccupied with features of perfectionism.
[edit] Philosophy the Day after Tomorrow
In his recent collection of essays, Philosophy the Day After Tomorrow (2005), Cavell makes the case that John Austin's concept of performative utterance requires the supplementary concept of passionate utterance: "A performative utterance is an offer of participation in the order of law. And perhaps we can say: A passionate utterance is an invitation to improvisation in the disorders of desire" (page 19). The book also contains extended discussions of Friedrich Nietzsche, Jane Austen, George Eliot, Henry James, and Fred Astaire, as well as familiar Cavellian subjects such as Shakespeare, Emerson, Thoreau, Wittgenstein, and Heidegger.
[edit] Bibliography
- Must We Mean What We Say? (1969)
- The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film (1971); 2nd enlarged edn. (1979)
- The Senses of Walden (1972)
- The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality, and Tragedy (1979)
- Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage (1981)
- Themes Out of School: Effects and Causes (1984)
- Disowning Knowledge: In Six Plays of Shakespeare (1987); 2nd edn.: Disowning Knowledge: In Seven Plays of Shakespeare (2003)
- In Quest of the Ordinary: Lines of Scepticism and Romanticism (1988)
- This New Yet Unapproachable America: Lectures after Emerson after Wittgenstein (1988)
- Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome: The Constitution of Emersonian Perfectionism (1990)
- A Pitch of Philosophy: Autobiographical Exercises (1994)
- Philosophical Passages: Wittgenstein, Emerson, Austin, Derrida (1995)
- Contesting Tears: The Melodrama of the Unknown Woman (1996)
- Emerson's Transcendental Etudes (2003)
- Cities of Words: Pedagogical Letters on a Register of the Moral Life (2004)
- Philosophy the Day after Tomorrow (2005)
[edit] External links
- A Philosopher Goes to the Movies: Conversation with Stanley Cavell
- Daniel Ross, Review of Cavell, Philosophy the Day after Tomorrow
- Harvard Philosophy Department website
