About the Book
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.
Table 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 is the author, editor, or coeditor of eleven books. He edited Stanley Cavell’s Emerson’s Transcendental Etudes (2003), guest edited a commemorative issue of Conversations: The Journal of Cavellian Studies, and edited The Thought of Stanley Cavell and Cinema: Turning Anew to the Ontology of Film a Half-Century after The World Viewed (Bloomsbury, 2020). He has held visiting research and teaching positions at Binghamton, Cornell, Cortland, Harvard, Ithaca College, and Vanderbilt. www.DavidLaRocca.org
Review :
In moods ranging from the elegiac to the exuberant to the contentious, the essays collected here remember Cavell and his work, put it to further use, and engage with it critically. Together their authors compose a conversation that amounts to what Cavell once described philosophy as being--an education for grownups--in which accomplished, mature thinkers continually seek their better selves, amidst the plights and possibilities of culture.
The welcoming tone rightly identified by the editor as one genius of Stanley Cavell’s exacting style has demonstrably been answered by this timely volume--and in just the right blend of reminiscence, reflection, and fresh testing. The intellectual heritage proposed, and so luminously proven, across these pages--convening a lineage of distinguished readers in their role, as always, of interlocutors--honors the balance of intimacy and reach in Cavell’s influential philosophical writing: a style of thought inseparable from the searching prose that gave, that gives, it shape.
The voices gathered in this collection, each finding a different balance between the claims of memory, sympathy, and critique, together illuminate the relation between Stanley Cavell’s life and his writings, and disclose an unattained but attainable future for philosophy to which we all might be attracted.
Inheriting Stanley Cavell, beautifully edited by David LaRocca, is so much more than a gathering of reminiscences and testimonials. So many of the pieces in the volume prove gripping, and they cumulatively transformed my sense of what Cavell had accomplished. This volume makes a strong case for the revolution that Cavell's extraordinary philosophic sensibility, powerful presence as a teacher, and wide-range of concerns brought about in North American philosophy. For many of the contributors, Cavell not only revived their faith in philosophy, but showed them what it meant to be alive in their feelings and thinking. He demonstrated, not only in The Claim of Reason but in his astonishing exploration of films, Shakespearean tragedies, and Wittgenstein, Emerson, and Thoreau, that the road back to ordinary language criticism was open, and our best hope for restoring value to humanistic study. The collection is also impressive for its decision to include dissenting voices.
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.
