Inheriting Stanley Cavell: Memories, Dreams, Reflections

Description

Some of the people who knew Stanley Cavell best--or know his work most intimately--are gathered in Inheriting Stanley Cavell to lend critical insight into the once and future legacy of this American titan of thought. Former students, colleagues, long-time friends, as well as distant admirers, explore moments when their personal experiences of Cavell’s singular philosophical and literary illuminations have, as he put it, “risen to the level of philosophical significance.” Many of the memories, dreams, and reflections on offer in this volume carry with them a welcome register of the autobiographical, expressing--much as Cavell did through his own writing--how the personal can become philosophical and thus provide a robust mode for the making of meaning and the clarifying of the human condition. Here, in varied styles and through a range of dynamic content, authors engage the lingering question of inheriting philosophy in whatever form it might take, and what it means to think about inheritance and enact it. Cover Series Editorial board Title Copyright Dedication Contents Introduction: Must We Say What We Learned? Parsing the Personal and the Philosophical I STANDARD CONSIDERATIONS 1 Must We Mean What We Say? On the Life and Thought of Stanley Cavell 2 Cavell at Film Criticism: “An Unreadiness to Become Explicit” 3 Cavell as Educator 4 What Cavell Made Possible for Philosophy 5 Cavell Reading Cavell II FEATS OF ORDINARY LANGUAGE 6 Cavell’s Redemptive Reading 7 Staging Praise / Owning Words 8 Resisting the Literal: Cavell’s Conversations with Thinking 9 Revisiting Ordinary Language Criticism 10 Monsters and Felicities: Vernacular Transformations of the Five-Foot Shelf III CINEMA, MUSIC, ART, AND AESTHETICS 11 The Idea that Films Could Have a Bearing on Philosophy 12 Words Fail Me. (Stanley Cavell’s Life Out of Music) 13 Cavell’s Ear for Things 14 How to Mean It: Some Simple Lessons 15 Stanley Cavell’s Doubling IV THE SIGNIFICANCE OF EVERYDAY LIFE 16 The Importance of Being Alive 17 Impression, Influence, Appreciation 18 Taking an Interest in Interest 19 Philosophy and Autobiography 20 Autophilosophy Acknowledgments Contributors Index