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List of contents
INTRODUCTION
Must We Say What We Learned? Parsing the Personal and the Philosophical (David LaRocca, Cornell University, USA)
I. STANDARD CONSIDERATIONS
1. Must We Mean What We Say? On the Life and Thought of Stanley Cavell (Marshall Cohen, University of Southern California, USA)
2. Cavell at Film Criticism: "An Unreadiness to Become Explicit" (Andrew Klevan, University of Oxford, UK)
3. Cavell as Educator (Mark Greif, Stanford University, USA)
4. What Cavell Made Possible for Philosophy (Susan Neiman, Einstein Forum, Germany)
5. Cavell Reading Cavell (William Rothman, University of Miami, USA)
II. FEATS OF ORDINARY LANGUAGE
6. Cavell's Redemptive Reading (Edward T. Duffy, Marquette University, USA)
7. Staging Praise / Owning Words (Charles Bernstein, University of Pennsylvania, USA)
8. Resisting the Literal: Cavell’s Conversations with Thinking (Ann Lauterbach, Bard College, USA)
9. Revisiting Ordinary Language Criticism (Kenneth Dauber, State University of New York at Buffalo, USA, and K. L. Evans, Independent Scholar)
10. Monsters and Felicities: Vernacular Transformations of the Five-Foot Shelf (Lawrence F. Rhu, University of South Carolina, USA)
III. CINEMA, MUSIC, ART, AND AESTHETICS
11. The Idea that Films Could Have a Bearing on Philosophy (Robert B. Pippin, University of Chicago, USA)
12. Words Fail Me. (Stanley Cavell’s Life out of Music) (William Day, Le Moyne College, USA)
13. Cavell’s Ear for Things (Andreas Teuber, Brandeis University, USA)
14. How to Mean It: Some Simple Lessons (Timothy Gould, Metropolitan State University of Denver, USA)
15. Stanley Cavell’s Doubling (Rex Butler, Monash University, Australia)
IV. THE SIGNIFICANCE OF EVERYDAY LIFE
16. The Importance of Being Alive (Sandra Laugier, University of Paris 1, Panthéon-Sorbonne, France)
17. Impression, Influence, Appreciation (Steven G. Affeldt, Le Moyne College, USA)
18. Taking an Interest in Interest (Richard Deming, Yale University, USA)
19. Philosophy and Autobiography (Toril Moi, Duke University, USA)
20. Autophilosophy (David LaRocca, Cornell University, USA)
Acknowledgments
Contributors
Index
About the author
David LaRocca, Ph.D., is the author or contributing editor of seventeen books, including several from Bloomsbury. He edited Stanley Cavell’s Emerson’s Transcendental Etudes (2003) and Metacinema (2021). Earlier edited volumes are devoted to the philosophy of documentary film, war films, and the cinema of Charlie Kaufman. He has taught philosophy, rhetoric, and cinema and held visiting research or teaching positions in the United States at Binghamton University, Cornell University, Harvard University, Ithaca College, the New York Public Library, the School of Visual Arts, the State University of New York at Cortland, and Vanderbilt University. He served as Harvard University’s Sinclair Kennedy Fellow in the United Kingdom and, like Cavell before him, was honored with the Distinguished Achievement Award from the Ralph Waldo Emerson Society. www.DavidLaRocca.org
Summary
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.
Foreword
Accomplished scholars and writers—some of them lifelong friends, students, and colleagues, others strangers and skeptical critics of Stanley Cavell—think and re-think the nature of their personal, impersonal (and our collective) intellectual indebtedness to Cavell’s half-century of contributions to philosophy, religion, literary studies, music, and cinema.
Additional text
David LaRocca has gathered together some of the world’s foremost scholars of Stanley Cavell's work for this terrific volume of essays responding to Cavell's philosophy. Collating reprints of groundbreaking essays and original contributions, the book offers wonderful insight into the breadth and depth of Cavell's influence and features a beautifully detailed and lucid introduction by LaRocca that interweaves the various strands of Cavell's philosophy and their legacies. This is without doubt a definitive body of responses to Cavell's work: a must-read for anyone interested in Cavell's work, whatever discipline they are approaching from, and whatever their level of specialism.
