Background
Cavell, Stanley was born on September 1, 1926 in Atlanta. Son of Irving and Fannie (Segal) Goldstein.
Cavell, Stanley was born on September 1, 1926 in Atlanta. Son of Irving and Fannie (Segal) Goldstein.
Bachelor of Arts in Music, University California, Berkeley, 1947. Doctor of Philosophy in Philosophy, Harvard University, 1961. Doctor of Humane Letters (honorary), Kalamazoo College, 1980.
Doctor of Humane Letters (honorary), University Chicago, 1987. Doctor of Letters (honorary), Iona College, 1985.
Assistant professor University California, Berkeley, 1956-1962. Walter M. Cabot professor of aesthetics and general theory of value Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, since 1963. Instructor in humanities The International Seminar, Cambridge, 1967, 68.
Visiting professor Philosophisches Institute, University Vienna, Austria, 1981, 83, Ecole Normal Supérieure, Paris, 1985. Patricia Wise lecturer American Film Institute, Washington, 1982. Mistress Wm. Beckman lecturer University California, Berkeley, 1983.
Edith Weigert lecturer Forum on Psychiatry and the Humanities, Washington, 1985. Tanner lecturer Stanford University, Palo Alto, 1986. Frederick Ives Carpenter lecturer University Chicago, 1987.
Jerusalem-Harvard lectures, 1992.
( In the first essay of this book, Stanley Cavell charact...)
( In these three lectures, Cavell situates Emerson at an ...)
(This handsome new edition of Stanley Cavell's landmark te...)
(Since the publication of his celebrated first essay on Sh...)
Fischer, Michael, Stanley Cavell and Literary Skepticism, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Fleming, R. and Payne, M. (1989) The Senses of Stanley Cavell, Bucknell University Press. Mulhall, Stephen (1994) Stanley Cavell: Philosophy's Recounting of the Ordinary.
Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Smith. J. H. and Kerrigan. W. (1987) Images in our Souls: Cavell, Psychoanalysis and Cinema, Johns Hopkins University Press.
Cavell is centrally concerned with the difficulty of properly grasping the obvious, associating Emerson’s appeal to the ‘common’ with Austin's to ‘ordinary’ language and Wittgenstein's to criteria. The self-knowledge involved in becoming conscious of the criteria governing one’s use of words has non-trivial relations with psychoanalysis, enabling one to grasp one’s relations with fellow language users and the world of which one speaks, best thought of in terms not of knowledge but of sympathy, indifference, avoidance and acknowledgement.
Heidegger's phenomenological analyses are relevant here. Philosophical writing should itself be transformative, with a rigour sharing the Kantian aspiration to a universal voice’ grounded in integrity of vision. Philosophical scepticism represents a form of that human aspiration to transcend finitude mapped by Romanticism whose defeat, as Shakespeare shows, can lead to tragedy.
Film as a medium mimics the sceptical predicament, with several of its genres engaging with the possibilities of human acknowledgement. Whether in epistemology, art, morality or politics, criteria do not confer impersonal certainty. Judgement is required and this may quite properly be in the service of self-transcending regulative ideals, such as Emersonian ‘perfectionism’, which defeat all appeal to established or self-justifying rules.
Until recently Cavell’s influence has been greater in the related disciplines with which he has engaged than in philosophy itself.
Fellow American Academy Arts and Sciences. Member America Philosophical Association (Carus lecturer 1988), The English Institute (trustee).
Scepticism and its modern cultural analogues in philosophy, literature, film and psychoanalysis.
Wittgenstein, Austin, Shakespeare, Kant, Emerson, Thoreau, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Freud and Heidegger.
Married Marcia Schmid, June 1955 (divorced 1961). 1 child, Rachel Lee; married Cathleen Cohen, June 22, 1967. Children: Benjamin William, David Franklin.
