Stanley Cavell
Cavell in 2016
Born
Stanley Louis Goldstein[3]

(1926-09-01)September 1, 1926
Atlanta, Georgia, U.S.
DiedJune 19, 2018(2018-06-19) (aged 91)
Boston, Massachusetts, U.S.
EducationUniversity of California, Berkeley (BA)
University of California, Los Angeles
Harvard University (PhD)
SchoolPostanalytic philosophy[1]
InstitutionsHarvard University
Doctoral students
Main interests
Skepticism, tragedy, aesthetics, ethics, ordinary language philosophy, American transcendentalism, film theory, William Shakespeare, opera, religion
Notable ideas
Linguistic film theory,[2] Moral perfectionism

Stanley Louis Cavell (/kəˈvɛl/; September 1, 1926 – June 19, 2018) was an American philosopher. He was the Walter M. Cabot Professor of Aesthetics and the General Theory of Value at Harvard University. He worked in the fields of ethics, aesthetics, and ordinary language philosophy. As an interpreter, he produced influential works on Wittgenstein, Austin, Emerson, Thoreau, and Heidegger. His work is characterized by its conversational tone and frequent literary references.

Life

Cavell was born as Stanley Louis Goldstein to a Jewish family in Atlanta, Georgia. His mother, a locally renowned pianist, trained him in music from his earliest days.[29] During the Depression, Cavell's parents moved several times between Atlanta and Sacramento, California.[30] As an adolescent, Cavell played lead alto saxophone as the youngest member of a black jazz band in Sacramento.[31] Around this time he changed his name, anglicizing the family's original Polish name, Kavelieruskii (sometimes spelled "Kavelieriskii").[32] He entered the University of California, Berkeley, where, along with his lifelong friend Bob Thompson, he majored in music, studying with, among others, Roger Sessions and Ernest Bloch.[33] After graduation, he studied composition at the Juilliard School of Music in New York City, only to discover that music was not his calling.[34]

He entered graduate school in philosophy at UCLA, and then transferred to Harvard University.[35] As a student there he came under the influence of J. L. Austin, whose teaching and methods "knocked him off ... [his] horse."[36] In 1954 he was awarded a Junior Fellowship at the Harvard Society of Fellows. Before completing his Ph.D., he became an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1956.[37] Cavell's daughter by his first wife (Marcia Cavell), Rachel Lee Cavell, was born in 1957. In 1962–63 Cavell was a Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, where he befriended the British philosopher Bernard Williams.[38] Cavell’s marriage to Marcia ended in divorce in 1961. In 1963 he returned to the Harvard Philosophy Department, where he became the Walter M. Cabot Professor of Aesthetics and the General Theory of Value.[39]

In the summer of 1964, Cavell joined a group of graduate students, who taught at Tougaloo College, a historically black Protestant college in Mississippi, as part of what became known as the Freedom Summer.[40] He and Cathleen (Cohen) Cavell were married in 1967. In April 1969, during the student protests (chiefly arising from the Vietnam War), Cavell, helped by his colleague John Rawls, worked with a group of African-American students to draft language for a faculty vote to establish Harvard's Department of African and African-American Studies.[41]

In 1976, Cavell's first son, Benjamin, was born. In 1979, along with the documentary filmmaker Robert H. Gardner, Cavell helped found the Harvard Film Archive, to preserve and present the history of film.[42] Cavell received a MacArthur Fellowship in 1992.[43] In 1996-97 Cavell was president of the American Philosophical Association (Eastern Division). In 1984, his second son, David, was born.[43] Cavell remained on the Harvard faculty until retiring in 1997. Thereafter, he taught courses at Yale University and the University of Chicago. He also held the Spinoza Chair of Philosophy at the University of Amsterdam in 1998.[44]

Cavell died in Boston, Massachusetts of heart failure on June 19, 2018, at the age of 91.[45] He was buried at Mount Auburn Cemetery.[46]

Philosophy

Although trained in the Anglo-American analytic tradition, Cavell frequently interacted with the continental tradition.[47] He includes film and literary study in philosophical inquiry.[47] Cavell wrote extensively on Ludwig Wittgenstein, J. L. Austin, and Martin Heidegger, as well as the American transcendentalists Henry Thoreau[48] and Ralph Waldo Emerson.[49] His work was for a time frequently compared to that of Jacques Derrida, whom he met in 1970. Although their exchange was congenial, Cavell denied the full extent to which deconstruction could undermine the possibility of meaning, instead taking an explicitly ordinary language approach to language and skepticism.[50] He writes about Wittgenstein in a fashion known as the New Wittgenstein, which according to Alice Crary interprets Wittgenstein as putting forward a positive view of philosophy as a therapeutic form.[51] Cavell's work incorporates autobiographical elements concerning how his movement between and within these thinkers' ideas influenced his views in the arts and humanities, beyond the technical study of philosophy.

Cavell established his distinct philosophical identity with Must We Mean What We Say? (1969), a collection of essays that addresses topics such as language use, metaphor, skepticism, tragedy, and literary interpretation from the point of view of ordinary language philosophy, of which he is a practitioner and ardent defender. One of the essays discusses Søren Kierkegaard's work on revelation and authority, The Book on Adler, in an effort to help reintroduce the book to modern philosophical readers.[52] In The World Viewed (1971) Cavell looks at photography, film, modernism in art and the nature of media, mentioning the influence of art critic Michael Fried on his work.

Cavell is well-known for The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality, and Tragedy (1979), which forms the centerpiece of his work and has its origins in his doctoral dissertation. In Pursuits of Happiness (1981), Cavell describes his experience of seven prominent Hollywood comedies: The Lady Eve, It Happened One Night, Bringing Up Baby, The Philadelphia Story, His Girl Friday, Adam’s Rib, and The Awful Truth. Cavell argues that these films, from 1934–1949, form part of what he calls the genre of "The Comedy of Remarriage," and finds in them great philosophical, moral, and political significance. Specifically, Cavell argues that these comedies show that "the achievement of happiness requires not the [...] satisfaction of our needs [...] but the examination and transformation of those needs."[53] According to Cavell, the emphasis these movies place on remarriage draws attention to the fact that, within a relationship, happiness requires "growing up" together with one's partner.[54]

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 used Emerson to outline the concept, the book suggests ways we might want to understand philosophy, literature, and film as preoccupied with features of perfectionism. In Philosophy the Day After Tomorrow (2005), a collection of essays, Cavell makes the case that J. L. 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."[55] 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. Cavell's final book, Little Did I Know: Excerpts from Memory (2010), is an autobiography written in the form of a diary. In a series of consecutive, dated entries, he inquires about the origins of his philosophy by telling the story of his life.

A scholarly journal, Conversations: The Journal of Cavellian Studies, engages with his philosophical work. It is edited by Sérgio Dias Branco and Amir Khan and published by the University of Ottawa.

Honorary degrees

Selected honors

Selected special lectureships

Bibliography

See also

References

  1. ^ Michael Adrian Peters, Education, Philosophy and Politics: The Selected Works of Michael A. Peters, Routledge, 2012, p. 210.
  2. ^ The Dualist Vols. 1–6, Department of Philosophy, Stanford University, 1994, p. 56.
  3. ^ David LaRocca, Emerson's English Traits and the Natural History of Metaphor, Bloomsbury Publishing, 2013, p. 318.
  4. ^ Bernstein, Charles (2 February 2013). "Stanley Cavell on Close Listening". Jacket2.
  5. ^ Kompridis, Nikolas (2006). "The Idea of a New Beginning". In Kompridis, Nikolas (ed.). Philosophical Romanticism. London: Routledge. pp. 32–59. ISBN 978-0-41525-643-8.
  6. ^ "An Interview with Stanley Cavell". The Senses of Stanley Cavell. Bucknell. 1989. p. 59.
  7. ^ Philosophy and Animal Life. Columbia University Press. 2008.
  8. ^ Revolution of the Ordinary. University of Chicago Press.
  9. ^ Felman, Shoshana (2003). The Scandal of the Speaking Body: Don Juan with J. L. Austin, or Seduction in Two Languages. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. ISBN 9780804766890.
  10. ^ Cantor, Jay (Summer 1981). "On Stanley Cavell". Raritan. 1 (1).
  11. ^ Crary, Alice; Sanford, Shieh, eds. (2006). Reading Cavell. Routledge. ISBN 978-1-13428-004-9.
  12. ^ "Stanley Cavell: Scepticisme et reconnaissance". La reconnaissance aujourd'hui. Sociologie. CNRS Éditions. July 2016. pp. 273–301. ISBN 9782271091550.
  13. ^ Davidson, Arnold (2013). "Spiritual Exercises, Improvisation, and Moral Perfectionism". In Lewis, George E; Piekut, Benjamin (eds.). The Oxford Handbook of Critical Improvisation Studies. Vol. 1. doi:10.1093/oxfordhb/9780195370935.001.0001. ISBN 978-0-19537-093-5.
  14. ^ Kindi, Vasso (2010). "Novelty and Revolution in Art and Science: The Connection between Kuhn and Cavell". Perspectives on Science. 18 (3): 284–310. doi:10.1162/POSC_a_00011. S2CID 57559025.
  15. ^ Saito, Naoko; Standish, Paul, eds. (2012). Stanley Cavell and the Education of Grownups. Fordham University. ISBN 9780823234738. JSTOR j.ctt14bs007.
  16. ^ Baskin, Jon (4 April 2010). "The Perspective of Terrence Malick". The Point.
  17. ^ Sousa, Ronald de (1985-07-14). "Why We Can't be Good". The New York Times.
  18. ^ Cavell, Stanley (2013-07-15). This New Yet Unapproachable America: Lectures after Emerson after Wittgenstein. ISBN 9780226037417.
  19. ^ Paul W. Franks
  20. ^ Lahav, Gil (1994). "An Interview with Ross McElwee". PBS.
  21. ^ Vries, Hent de (2011). ""A Greatest Miracle": Stanley Cavell, Moral Perfectionism, and the Ascent into the Ordinary". Modern Theology. 27 (3): 462–477. doi:10.1111/j.1468-0025.2011.01688.x.
  22. ^ Hearne, Vicki (2019-03-06). "The Claim of Speech". Poetry Foundation.
  23. ^ Shell, Marc (2005). Polio and its Aftermath: The Paralysis of Culture. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ISBN 978-0-67401-315-5.
  24. ^ Bannes, Simon (25 August 2008). "Entre Stanley Cavell et Arnaud Desplechin". Nonfiction.
  25. ^ Mendieta, Eduardo (Fall 2004). "Empire, Pragmatism, and War: A Conversation with Cornel West". Logos. 3 (4). Archived from the original on 18 October 2004.
  26. ^ "Screening Room 1972-1981". May 2013.
  27. ^ Sjöstedt, Johanna (8 March 2013). "What is feminist philosophy?". Eurozine.
  28. ^ MacArthur, David (2016). "Living Our Skepticism of Others Through Film: Remarks in Light of Cavell". SubStance. 45 (3): 120–136. doi:10.1353/sub.2016.0032. ISSN 1527-2095.
  29. ^ Little Did I Know, 21 (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2010).
  30. ^ Little Did I Know, 24 (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2010).
  31. ^ Little Did I Know, 169 (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2010).
  32. ^ Harrison Smith, "Stanley Cavell, philosopher who drew insights from Shakespeare and cinema, dies at 91," Washington Post obituary, June 21, 2018.
  33. ^ Little Did I Know, 85, 157-62, 166, 183 (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2010).
  34. ^ Little Did I Know, 220-225 (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2010).
  35. ^ Little Did I Know, 247 (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2010).
  36. ^ The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality and Tragedy, xv (New York: Oxford, 1979).
  37. ^ Little Did I Know, 326 (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2010).
  38. ^ Little Did I Know, 149 (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2010).
  39. ^ Little Did I Know, 435 (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2010).
  40. ^ Little Did I Know, 373 (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2010).
  41. ^ Little Did I Know, 508–512 (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2010).
  42. ^ "An Evening with Stanley Cavell - Harvard Film Archive". Archived from the original on 2011-06-10.
  43. ^ a b "Department of Philosophy".
  44. ^ Spinozaleerstoel afdeling Filosofie
  45. ^ "Stanley Cavell, Prominent Harvard Philosopher, Dies at 91". The New York Times. June 20, 2018. Retrieved June 21, 2018.
  46. ^ Stanley Cavell Obituary
  47. ^ a b Wheatley, Catherine (2019). Stanley Cavell and Film: Scepticism and Self-Reliance at the Cinema. London: Bloomsbury Publishing. p. 19. ISBN 978-1-7883-1025-3.
  48. ^ Hunt, Lester H. (2019). The Philosophy of Henry Thoreau: Ethics, Politics, and Nature. London: Bloomsbury Publishing. pp. x. ISBN 978-1-350-07902-1.
  49. ^ Standish, Paul; Saito, Naoko (2017). Stanley Cavell and Philosophy as Translation: The Truth is Translated. London: Rowman & Littlefield. p. 45. ISBN 978-1-78660-289-3.
  50. ^ Gordon C. F. Bearn. “Sounding Serious: Cavell and Derrida.” Representations, no. 63, University of California Press, 1998, pp. 65–92, https://doi.org/10.2307/2902918.
  51. ^ Peters, Michael A. (2020). Wittgenstein, Anti-foundationalism, Technoscience and Philosophy of Education: An Educational Philosophy and Theory Reader Volume VIII. Oxon: Routledge. ISBN 978-1-000-02800-3.
  52. ^ Jones, Joe R. (July 1977). "Some Remarks on Authority and Revelation in Kierkegaard". The Journal of Religion. 57 (3): 237.
  53. ^ Cavell, Pursuits of Happiness, 1981, pp. 4–5.
  54. ^ Cavell, Pursuits of Happiness, 1981, p. 136.
  55. ^ Cavell, Philosophy the Day after Tomorrow (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London: Harvard University Press, 2005), p. 19.

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