Two Testimonies in American Philosophy: Stanley Cavell, Henry Bugbee

2003 ◽  
Vol 17 (2) ◽  
pp. 108-121
Author(s):  
Edward F. Mooney
Keyword(s):  
Stanley Cavell ◽  
American Philosophy

Cavell, Stanley (1926–)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen Mulhall
Keyword(s):  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Literary Theory ◽  
Film Studies ◽  
Ordinary Language ◽  
Ordinary Language Philosophy ◽  
Language Philosophy ◽  
Stanley Cavell ◽  
American Philosophy ◽  
Anglo American ◽  
Theory Of Value

Born in Atlanta, Georgia, Stanley Cavell has held the Walter M. Cabot Chair in Aesthetics and the General Theory of Value at Harvard University since 1963. The range, diversity and distinctiveness of his writings are unparalleled in twentieth-century Anglo-American philosophy. As well as publishing essays on modernist painting and music, he has created a substantial body of work in film studies, literary theory and literary criticism; he has introduced new and fruitful ways of thinking about psychoanalysis and its relationship with philosophy; and his work on Heidegger and Derrida, taken together with his attempts to revitalize the tradition of Emersonian Transcendentalism, have defined new possibilities for a distinctively American contribution to philosophical culture. This complex oeuvre is unified by a set of thematic concerns – relating to scepticism and moral perfectionism – which are rooted in Cavell’s commitment to the tradition of ordinary language philosophy, as represented in the work of J.L. Austin and Wittgenstein.

scholarly journals Senses of Echo Lake: Michael Palmer, Stanley Cavell, and the Moods of an American Philosophical Tradition

Humanities ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 98
Author(s):  
Richard Deming
Keyword(s):  
Ralph Waldo Emerson ◽  
Henry David Thoreau ◽  
Philosophical Tradition ◽  
Stanley Cavell ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Ethical Implications ◽  
American Philosophy ◽  
Active Reading ◽  
Moral Perfectionism ◽  
The Way

This essay explores a philosophical tradition that Stanley Cavell has traced out and which he emphasizes as being American inasmuch as it is arises out of the thinking of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. It then investigates how the poems of the avant-garde poet Michael Palmer link with, overlap with, this strain of American philosophy in terms of how it enacts an understanding of what we might call “philosophical mood,” on outlook based on the navigation of representation, generative self-consciousness, and doubt that amounts to a form of epistemology. The essay does not trace the influence—direct or otherwise of Cavell and his arguments for philosophy on the poems, despite a biographical connection between Cavell and Palmer, his former student. Instead it brings out the way that one might fruitfully locate Palmer’s work within an American literary/philosophical continuum. The article shows how that context opens up the work to a range of important existential and ethical implications. I endeavor to show that Notes for Echo Lake, Palmer’s most important collection, locates itself, its language, within such a frame so as to provide a place for readerly encounters with the limitations of language. These encounters then are presented as an opportunity for a deeper understanding of subjectivity and for attuning oneself to the role that active reading and interpretation might play in moral perfectionism.

“A Radiant and Productive Atmosphere”: Encounters of Wallace Stevens and Stanley Cavell

2012 ◽  
Vol 46 (3) ◽  
pp. 681-694
Author(s):  
ÁINE KELLY
Keyword(s):  
Hannah Arendt ◽  
King Lear ◽  
Wallace Stevens ◽  
Marianne Moore ◽  
Sunday Morning ◽  
Stanley Cavell ◽  
Arts And Sciences ◽  
American Philosophy ◽  
The Arts ◽  
The Aesthetic

Writing on such diverse works as Shakespeare'sKing Lear, Wallace Stevens's “Sunday Morning” and Vincente Minnelli'sThe Bandwagon, Stanley Cavell is a philosopher consistently moved to philosophize in the realm of the aesthetic. Cavell invokes Stevens, particularly, at moments of hisoeuvreboth casual and constructive. In a commemorative address of the “Pontigny-en-Amérique” encounters at Mount Holyoke College in 2006, Cavell takes Stevens as his direct subject. During the original Pontigny colloquia, held during the wartime summers of 1942–44, some of the leading European figures in the arts and sciences (among them Hannah Arendt and Claude Lévi-Strauss) gathered at Mount Holyoke with their American peers (Stevens, John Peale Bishop and Marianne Moore) for conversations about the future of human civilization and the place of philosophy in a precarious world. Stevens suggested at the Pontigny meeting that the philosopher, compared unfavourably to the poet, “fails to discover.” As it is precisely Cavell's acknowledgement of the accidental or the unexpected as displaced from philosophy that draws him to the writings of Stevens, the Mount Holyoke encounters promise an illuminating dialogue between the two. The affinity between such central champions of the poetic dimension of American philosophy is sometimes obvious, more times in question.

Cavell, Stanley (1926–)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen Mulhall
Keyword(s):  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Literary Theory ◽  
Film Studies ◽  
Ordinary Language ◽  
Ordinary Language Philosophy ◽  
Language Philosophy ◽  
Stanley Cavell ◽  
American Philosophy ◽  
Anglo American ◽  
Theory Of Value

Born in Atlanta, Georgia, Stanley Cavell held the Walter M. Cabot Chair in Aesthetics and the General Theory of Value at Harvard University from 1963 until his retirement in 1997. The range, diversity and distinctiveness of his writings are unparalleled in twentieth-century Anglo-American philosophy. As well as publishing essays on modernist painting and music, he has created a substantial body of work in film studies, literary theory and literary criticism; he has introduced new and fruitful ways of thinking about psychoanalysis and its relationship with philosophy; and his work on ‘Continental’ philosophers such as Nietzsche, Heidegger and Derrida, together with his attempts to revitalize the tradition of Emersonian Transcendentalism, has defined new possibilities for a distinctively American contribution to philosophical culture. This complex oeuvre is unified by a set of thematic concerns – relating to scepticism and moral perfectionism – which are rooted in Cavell’s commitment to the tradition of ordinary language philosophy, as represented in the work of J.L. Austin and Wittgenstein.

A Brief Encounter with Stanley Cavell

2016 ◽  
pp. 73-76
Author(s):  
Darko Štrajn
Keyword(s):  
Stanley Cavell ◽  
American Philosophy ◽  
Anglo American ◽  
To Come

Stanley Cavell was hardly known to me before I met him in person. And then I wasgenuinely astounded about how, until then in my own pursuits in philosophy to come to terms with the (in)famous discrepancies and differences between the Continental and Anglo-American philosophy, I had somehow managed to miss his contributions.

Illuminations of the Quotidian in Nishida, Chan/Zen Buddhism, and Sino-Japanese Philosophy

2013 ◽  
Vol 40 (5) ◽  
pp. 135-145
Author(s):  
Steve Odin
Keyword(s):  
Chinese Philosophy ◽  
Zen Buddhism ◽  
Chan Buddhism ◽  
Stanley Cavell ◽  
American Philosophy ◽  
Signature Motif ◽  
Nishida Kitaro

Return to the ordinary as extraordinary has become the signature motif for the Emersonian perfectionism of Stanley Cavell in contemporary American philosophy. In this article I develop Cavell’s notion of “the ordinary” as an intercultural theme for exploring aspects of traditional Chinese philosophy, especially Confucianism and Chan Buddhism. I further use Cavell’s philosophy of the ordinary to examine Sino-Japanese thought as found in the Zen tradition of Japan and its reformulation by Nishida Kitarô in modern Japanese philosophy. It will be seen how for both Cavell and Sino-Japanese philosophy, perfection is achieved not by transcendence of the ordinary, but through continuous return to and affirmation of the ordinary as extraordinary. I thus endeavor to illuminate the quotidian as articulated by Cavell, Chinese philosophy, and the Sino-Japanese tradition.

scholarly journals Continuing Education with Stanley Cavell

2019 ◽  
pp. 54-59
Author(s):  
Naoko Saito
Keyword(s):  
Continuing Education ◽  
Teaching Assistant ◽  
Hilary Putnam ◽  
Stanley Cavell ◽  
American Philosophy ◽  
Term Paper

How many times in my life have I re-encountered my teacher, Stanley Cavell? The most memorable, the first encounter with him was in the winter of 1996 at Harvard—the image still vivid in my memory, the snow falling outside the window of his room, with me sitting in front of Stanley. At the suggestions of a teaching assistant of Hilary Putnam, who had read my term paper, I made an appointment with Stanley and introduced myself along with my abiding question regarding American philosophy. When I presented this as my being “torn” between Emerson and Dewey, Stanley reacted immediately and expressed his sense of sympathy with me. That was the beginning of a kind of continuing education for me and of the lifelong task I consider myself to have shared with him.

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