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Stanley Cavell
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Stanley Cavell
Born
Stanley Louis Goldstein[1]
(legally changed name to Stanley Louis Cavell in 1942)
September 1, 1926 (age90)
Atlanta, Georgia
Almamater
University of California, Berkeley (B.A.)
UCLA (no degree)
Harvard University (Ph.D.)
Era
20th-century philosophy
Region
Western philosophy
School
Postanalytic philosophy[2]
Main interests
Skepticism, tragedy, aesthetics, ethics, ordinary language philosophy, American
transcendentalism, film theory, William Shakespeare, opera, religion
Notable ideas
Philosophy of language film analysis
Influences
[show]

Influenced
[show]

Stanley Louis Cavell (/kvl/; born September 1, 1926) is an American

philosopher. He is the Walter M. Cabot Professor of Aesthetics and the
General Theory of Value, Emeritus, at Harvard University.
Contents [hide]

1
Life
2
Philosophy
3
Selected works
4
Honorary degrees
5
Selected honors
6
Selected special lectureships
7
Bibliography
8
References
9
Further reading
10
External links

Life[edit]

Cavell was born to a Jewish family in Atlanta, Georgia. His mother, a locally
renowned pianist, trained him in music from his earliest days.[3] During the
Depression, Cavells parents moved several times between Atlanta and
Sacramento, California.[4]
As a teenager, Cavell played lead alto saxophone as the youngest and sole
white member of a black jazz band in Sacramento.[5] At 16, he entered the
University of California, Berkeley, where he majored in music, studying with,
among others, Roger Sessions and Ernest Bloch.[6] After graduation, he
began studies in composition at the Juilliard School of Music in New York
City, only to discover that music was no longer his aspiration.[7] He eventually
began to study philosophy at UCLA, and then transferred as a graduate
student to Harvard University.[8] As a student there he came under the
influence of the visiting J. L. Austin, whose teaching and methods "knocked
him off ... [his] horse."[9] 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.[10] From 19621963 Cavell was a Fellow at the Institute for Advanced
Study in Princeton, New Jersey, where he became a lifelong friend of the
British philosopher Bernard Williams.[11] 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.[12]

In the summer of 1964, Cavell joined a group of Harvard faculty and graduate
students, who taught at Tougaloo College, a historically black college in
Mississippi, as part of what became known as the Freedom Summer.[13] In
April 1969, during the time of student protests arising from, among other
things, the Vietnam War, Cavell, together with his colleague John Rawls,
worked with a group of African-American students to draft language for a vote
by the faculty that established the Department of African and AfricanAmerican Studies at Harvard.[14]
In 1979, along with the documentary filmmaker Robert Gardner, Cavell
helped establish the Harvard Film Archive, to preserve and present the
history of film.[15] Cavell received a MacArthur Fellowship in 1992.[16] From
1996-1997 Cavell was President of the American Philosophical Association
(Eastern Division).[17] He remained on the Harvard faculty until his retirement
in 1997. After retiring, 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.[18]
Cavells first marriage, to Marcia (Schmid) Cavell, ended in divorce in 1961;
their daughter, Rachel Lee Cavell, was born in 1957. He and Cathleen
(Cohen) Cavell were married in 1967 and live in Brookline, Massachusetts;
they have two sons, Benjamin (born 1976) and David (born 1984).

Philosophy[edit]

Although trained in the Anglo-American analytic tradition, Cavell often

interacts with the continental tradition. He is well known for his inclusion of
film and literary study in philosophical inquiry. Cavell has written extensively
on Ludwig Wittgenstein, J. L. Austin, and Martin Heidegger, as well as on the
American transcendentalists Henry Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson. He
has been associated with an approach toward interpreting Wittgenstein
sometimes known as the New Wittgenstein. Much of Cavell's writing
incorporates autobiographical elements concerning how his movement
between and within the ideas of these thinkers influenced and influences his
own thinking.

Selected works[edit]

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, from the point of view of ordinary language philosophy,
of which he is a practitioner and ardent defender. One of the essays
discusses Sren Kierkegaard's work on revelation and authority, The Book on
Adler, in an effort to help re-introduce the book to modern philosophical
readers.[19] In The World Viewed (1971) Cavell looks at photography and film.
He also writes on modernism in art, and the nature of media, where he
mentions the importance to his work of the writing of art critic Michael Fried.

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.
The book was republished in 1999.[citation needed] 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, Adams Rib, and The Awful Truth. Cavell argues that
these films, from the years 19341949, form part of what he calls the genre of
"The Comedy of Remarriage," and he finds in them great philosophical,
moral, and indeed political significance. Specifically, Cavell argues that these
Hollywood comedies show that "the achievement of happiness requires not
the [...] satisfaction of our needs [...] but the examination and transformation
of those needs."[20] According to Cavell, the emphasis that these movies place
on "remarriage" draws attention to the fact that, within a relationship,
happiness requires "growing up" together with one's partner.[21]
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. In his collection of
essaysPhilosophy the Day After Tomorrow (2005), 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."[22] 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 most recent book as of 2016, 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, Cavell inquires about the
origins of his philosophy by telling the story of his life.

Honorary degrees[edit]

Doctor of Humane Letters, Kalamazoo College, 1980

Doctor of Letters, Iona College[disambiguation needed], 1985
Doctor of Humane Letters, University of Chicago, 1987
Docteur, Honoris Causa, Universit de Strasbourg, 1996
Doctor Philosophiae Honoris Causa, Hebrew University, 1997
Doctor of Letters, Honoris Causa, University of East Anglia, 2009
Docteur, Honoris Causa, Ecole Normale Superieure, Lyon, 2010
Doctor of Letters, Wesleyan University, 2010
Doctor of Theology, Institut Protestant de Thologie de Paris, 2010

Selected honors[edit]

Junior Fellow, Society of Fellows, Harvard University, 1953-56

Fellow, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, New Jersey, 1962-1963
Distinguished Teaching Award, University of California, Berkeley, 1961
Fellow, Wesleyan University Center for the Humanities, 1970-1971
Fellow, American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 1978President, American Philosophical Association (Eastern Division),
1996-97
2000 Centennial Medalist, Harvard University Graduate School of Arts
and Sciences
Romanell Phi Beta Kappa Professorship, 2004-05

Patricia Wise Lecture, American Film Institute, 1982

Mrs. William Beckman Lectures, University of California, Berkeley, 1983
Tanner Lecture, Stanford University, April 1986
Carus Lectures, American Philosophical Association, 1988
Plenary Address, Shakespeare World Congress, Los Angeles, 1996
Presidential Address, American Philosophical Association, Atlanta, 1996
Howison Lectures, University of California, Berkeley, February, 2002

Must We Mean What We Say? (1969)

The Senses of Walden (1972) Expanded edition San Francisco: North
Point Press, 1981.
The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film (1971); 2nd
enlarged edn. (1979)
The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality, and Tragedy
(1979) New York: Oxford University Press.
Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage (1981)
ISBN 978-0-674-73906-2
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)
Chicago: Chicago University Press.
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)

Selected special lectureships[edit]

Bibliography[edit]

Emerson's Transcendental Etudes (2003)

Cities of Words: Pedagogical Letters on a Register of the Moral Life
(2004)
Philosophy the Day after Tomorrow (2005)
Little Did I Know: Excerpts from Memory (2010)

References[edit]
1

3
4
5

10

11

12

13

Jump up
^ David LaRocca, Emerson's English Traits and the Natural History of
Metaphor, Bloomsbury Publishing, 2013, p. 318.
Jump up
^ Michael Adrian Peters, Education, Philosophy and Politics: The Selected
Works of Michael A. Peters, Routledge, 2012, p. 210.
Jump up
^ Little Did I Know, 21 (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2010).
Jump up
^ Little Did I Know, 24 (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2010).
Jump up
^ Little Did I Know, 169 (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press,
2010).
Jump up
^ Little Did I Know, 85, 183 (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press,
2010).
Jump up
^ Little Did I Know, 220-225 (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press,
2010).
Jump up
^ Little Did I Know, 247 (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press,
2010).
Jump up
^ The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality and Tragedy, xv
(New York: Oxford, 1979).
Jump up
^ Little Did I Know, 326 (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press,
2010).
Jump up
^ Little Did I Know, 149 (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press,
2010).
Jump up
^ Little Did I Know, 435 (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press,
2010).
Jump up
^ Little Did I Know, 373 (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press,
2010).

14 Jump up
^ Little Did I Know, 508512 (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press,
2010).
15 Jump up
^ [1]
16 Jump up
^ [2]
17 Jump up
^ [3]
18 Jump up
^ [4]
19 Jump up
^ Journal of Religion, vol. 57, 1977
20 Jump up
^ Cavell, Pursuits of Happiness, 1981, pp. 45.
21 Jump up
^ Cavell, Pursuits of Happiness, 1981, p. 136.
22 Jump up
^ Cavell, Philosophy the Day after Tomorrow (Cambridge, Massachusetts, &
London: Harvard University Press, 2005), p. 19.

Further reading[edit]

Books
Michael Fischer, Stanley Cavell and Literary Criticism, Chicago U.P.,
1989
Richard Fleming and Michael Payne (eds), The Senses of Stanley
Cavell, Bucknell U.P., 1989
Ted Cohen, Paul Guyer, and Hilary Putnam, eds., Pursuits of Reason:
Essays in Honor of Stanley Cavell, Texas Tech U.P., 1993
Stephen Mulhall, Stanley Cavell: Philosophys Recounting of the
Ordinary, Clarendon Press, 1994
Timothy Gould, Hearing Things: Voice and Method in the Writing of
Stanley Cavell, Chicago U.P., 1998
Espen Hammer, Stanley Cavell: Skepticism, Subjectivity, and the
Ordinary, Polity Press/Blackwells, 2002
Richard Eldridge (ed.), Stanley Cavell, Cambridge U.P., 2003
Sandra Laugier, Une autre pense politique amricaine: La dmocratie
radicale dEmerson Stanley Cavell, Michel Houdiard diteur, 2004
Russell Goodman (ed.), Contending with Stanley Cavell, Oxford U.P.,
2005.
Articles
The Stanley Cavell Special Issue: Writings and Ideas on Film Studies,
An Appreciation in Six Essays, Film International, Issue 22, Vol. 4, No. 4
(2006), Jeffrey Crouse, guest editor. The essays include those by Diane

Stevenson, Charles Warren, Anke Brouwers and Tom Paulus, William

Rothman, Morgan Bird, and George Toles.
"Why Not Realize Your World?" Philosopher/Film Scholar William
Rothman Interviewed by Jeffrey Crouse" in Film International, Issue 54,
Vol. 9, No. 6 (2011), pp.5973.
Special Section on Stanley Cavell. Film-Philosophy Vol. 18 (2014):
1-171.

External links[edit]

Wikiquote has quotations related to: Stanley Cavell

Harvard Philosophy Department website

Conversations: The Journal of Cavellian Studies
A Philosopher Goes to the Movies: Conversation with Stanley Cavell
Daniel Ross, Review of Cavell, Philosophy the Day after Tomorrow
A study (in French) on Cavell's idea of perfectionism
Stanley Cavell
PennSound page with audio and video links
Radio interview by Charles Bernstein
Authority control
WorldCat Identities VIAF: 110043191 LCCN: n78090539 ISNI: 0000 0001 1698
3900 GND: 118893343 SUDOC: 029785804 BNF: cb121336505 (data) NDL:
01026649 BNE: XX4579730

Saved in parser cache with key enwiki:pcache:idhash:685947-0!*!0!!en!4!*

and timestamp 20161116150910 and revision id 742068927 <img src="//
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:CentralAutoLogin/start?type=1x1" alt="" title=""
width="1" height="1" style="border: none; position: absolute;" />
Categories: 1926 birthsLiving peoplePeople from Brookline,
MassachusettsAmerican JewsMacArthur FellowsHarvard University
alumniAmerican philosophers20th-century philosophersWittgensteinian
philosophersAnalytic philosophersPhilosophers of languageJewish
philosophersFilm theoristsFilm theoryHarvard University
facultyWesleyan University facultyUniversity of California, Berkeley
alumniOrdinary language philosophy

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