Cavell was born as Stanley Louis Goldstein to a
Jewish family in
Atlanta, Georgia. His mother, a locally renowned pianist, trained him in music from his earliest days.[29] During the Depression, Cavell's parents moved several times between Atlanta and
Sacramento, California.[30] As an adolescent, Cavell played lead
alto saxophone as the youngest member of a black jazz band in Sacramento.[31] Around this time he changed his name, anglicizing the family's original Polish name, Kavelieruskii (sometimes spelled "Kavelieriskii").[32] He entered the
University of California, Berkeley, where, along with his lifelong friend
Bob Thompson, he majored in music, studying with, among others,
Roger Sessions and
Ernest Bloch.[33] After graduation, he studied composition at the
Juilliard School of Music in
New York City, only to discover that music was not his calling.[34]
He entered graduate school in philosophy at
UCLA, and then transferred to
Harvard University.[35] As a student there he came under the influence of
J. L. Austin, whose teaching and methods "knocked him off ... [his] horse."[36] In 1954 he was awarded a Junior Fellowship at the
Harvard Society of Fellows. Before completing his Ph.D., he became an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1956.[37] Cavell's daughter by his first wife (Marcia Cavell), Rachel Lee Cavell, was born in 1957. In 1962–63 Cavell was a Fellow at the
Institute for Advanced Study in
Princeton, New Jersey, where he befriended the British philosopher
Bernard Williams.[38] Cavell’s marriage to Marcia ended in divorce in 1961. In 1963 he returned to the Harvard Philosophy Department, where he became the Walter M. Cabot Professor of Aesthetics and the General Theory of Value.[39]
In the summer of 1964, Cavell joined a group of graduate students, who taught at
Tougaloo College, a
historically black Protestant college in Mississippi, as part of what became known as the
Freedom Summer.[40] He and Cathleen (Cohen) Cavell were married in 1967. In April 1969, during the student protests (chiefly arising from the
Vietnam War), Cavell, helped by his colleague
John Rawls, worked with a group of African-American students to draft language for a faculty vote to establish Harvard's Department of African and African-American Studies.[41]
Although trained in the Anglo-American
analytic tradition, Cavell frequently interacted with the
continental tradition.[47] He includes
film and
literary study in philosophical inquiry.[47] Cavell wrote extensively on
Ludwig Wittgenstein,
J. L. Austin, and
Martin Heidegger, as well as the
American transcendentalistsHenry Thoreau[48] and
Ralph Waldo Emerson.[49] His work was for a time frequently compared to that of
Jacques Derrida, whom he met in 1970. Although their exchange was congenial, Cavell denied the full extent to which
deconstruction could undermine the possibility of meaning, instead taking an explicitly
ordinary language approach to language and skepticism.[50] He writes about Wittgenstein in a fashion known as the
New Wittgenstein, which according to
Alice Crary interprets Wittgenstein as putting forward a positive view of philosophy as a therapeutic form.[51] Cavell's work incorporates autobiographical elements concerning how his movement between and within these thinkers' ideas influenced his views in the arts and humanities, beyond the technical study of philosophy.
Cavell established his distinct philosophical identity with Must We Mean What We Say? (1969), a collection of essays that addresses topics such as language use, metaphor, skepticism, tragedy, and literary interpretation from the point of view of
ordinary language philosophy, of which he is a practitioner and ardent defender. One of the essays discusses
Søren Kierkegaard's work on revelation and authority, The Book on Adler, in an effort to help reintroduce the book to modern philosophical readers.[52] In The World Viewed (1971) Cavell looks at photography, film, modernism in art and the nature of media, mentioning the influence of art critic
Michael Fried on his work.
Cavell is well-known for The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality, and Tragedy (1979), which forms the centerpiece of his work and has its origins in his doctoral dissertation. In Pursuits of Happiness (1981), Cavell describes his experience of seven prominent Hollywood comedies: The Lady Eve, It Happened One Night, Bringing Up Baby, The Philadelphia Story, His Girl Friday, Adam’s Rib, and The Awful Truth. Cavell argues that these films, from 1934–1949, form part of what he calls the genre of "
The Comedy of Remarriage," and finds in them great philosophical, moral, and political significance. Specifically, Cavell argues that these comedies show that "the achievement of happiness requires not the [...] satisfaction of our needs [...] but the examination and transformation of those needs."[53] According to Cavell, the emphasis these movies place on remarriage draws attention to the fact that, within a relationship, happiness requires "growing up" together with one's partner.[54]
In Cities of Words (2004) Cavell traces the history of
moral perfectionism, a mode of moral thinking spanning the history of Western philosophy and literature. Having used Emerson to outline the concept, the book suggests ways we might want to understand philosophy, literature, and film as preoccupied with features of perfectionism. In Philosophy the Day After Tomorrow (2005), a collection of essays, Cavell makes the case that J. L. Austin's concept of
performative utterance requires the supplementary concept of passionate utterance: "A performative utterance is an offer of participation in the order of law. And perhaps we can say: A passionate utterance is an invitation to improvisation in the disorders of desire."[55] The book also contains extended discussions of
Friedrich Nietzsche,
Jane Austen,
George Eliot,
Henry James, and
Fred Astaire, as well as familiar Cavellian subjects such as
Shakespeare, Emerson, Thoreau, Wittgenstein, and Heidegger. Cavell's final book, Little Did I Know: Excerpts from Memory (2010), is an autobiography written in the form of a diary. In a series of consecutive, dated entries, he inquires about the origins of his philosophy by telling the story of his life.
A scholarly journal, Conversations: The Journal of Cavellian Studies, engages with his philosophical work. It is edited by
Sérgio Dias Branco and Amir Khan and published by the
University of Ottawa.
^Kompridis, Nikolas (2006). "The Idea of a New Beginning". In Kompridis, Nikolas (ed.). Philosophical Romanticism. London: Routledge. pp. 32–59.
ISBN978-0-41525-643-8.
^Kindi, Vasso (2010). "Novelty and Revolution in Art and Science: The Connection between Kuhn and Cavell". Perspectives on Science. 18 (3): 284–310.
doi:
10.1162/POSC_a_00011.
S2CID57559025.
^Saito, Naoko; Standish, Paul, eds. (2012). Stanley Cavell and the Education of Grownups. Fordham University.
ISBN9780823234738.
JSTORj.ctt14bs007.
^MacArthur, David (2016). "Living Our Skepticism of Others Through Film: Remarks in Light of Cavell". SubStance. 45 (3): 120–136.
doi:
10.1353/sub.2016.0032.
ISSN1527-2095.
^Little Did I Know, 21 (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2010).
^Little Did I Know, 24 (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2010).
^Little Did I Know, 169 (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2010).
^
abWheatley, Catherine (2019). Stanley Cavell and Film: Scepticism and Self-Reliance at the Cinema. London: Bloomsbury Publishing. p. 19.
ISBN978-1-7883-1025-3.
^Hunt, Lester H. (2019). The Philosophy of Henry Thoreau: Ethics, Politics, and Nature. London: Bloomsbury Publishing. pp. x.
ISBN978-1-350-07902-1.
^Standish, Paul; Saito, Naoko (2017). Stanley Cavell and Philosophy as Translation: The Truth is Translated. London: Rowman & Littlefield. p. 45.
ISBN978-1-78660-289-3.
^Gordon C. F. Bearn. “Sounding Serious: Cavell and Derrida.” Representations, no. 63, University of California Press, 1998, pp. 65–92,
https://doi.org/10.2307/2902918.
^Peters, Michael A. (2020). Wittgenstein, Anti-foundationalism, Technoscience and Philosophy of Education: An Educational Philosophy and Theory Reader Volume VIII. Oxon: Routledge.
ISBN978-1-000-02800-3.
^Cavell, Philosophy the Day after Tomorrow (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London: Harvard University Press, 2005), p. 19.
Further reading
Books
Michael Fischer, Stanley Cavell and Literary Criticism, Chicago U.P., 1989
Richard Fleming and Michael Payne (eds), The Senses of Stanley Cavell, Bucknell U.P., 1989
Ted Cohen, Paul Guyer, and Hilary Putnam, eds., Pursuits of Reason: Essays in Honor of Stanley Cavell, Texas Tech U.P., 1993
Stephen Mulhall, Stanley Cavell: Philosophy’s Recounting of the Ordinary, Clarendon Press, 1994
Timothy Gould, Hearing Things: Voice and Method in the Writing of Stanley Cavell, Chicago U.P., 1998
Espen Hammer, Stanley Cavell: Skepticism, Subjectivity, and the Ordinary, Polity Press/Blackwell’s, 2002
Richard Eldridge (ed.), Stanley Cavell, Cambridge U.P., 2003
Sandra Laugier, Une autre pensée politique américaine: La démocratie radicale d’Emerson á Stanley Cavell, Michel Houdiard Ēditeur, 2004
Russell Goodman (ed.), Contending with Stanley Cavell, Oxford U.P., 2005.
Alice Crary and Sanford Shieh (eds.), Reading Cavell, Routledge, 2006.
William Rothman and Marian Keane, Reading Cavell's The World Viewed, 2000.
Catherine Wheatley, Stanley Cavell and Film: Scepticism and Self-Reliance at the Cinema, 2019.
David LaRocca (ed.), The Thought of Stanley Cavell and Cinema, 2019.
Articles
The Stanley Cavell Special Issue: Writings and Ideas on Film Studies, An Appreciation in Six Essays, Film International, Issue 22, Vol. 4, No. 4 (2006), Jeffrey Crouse, guest editor. The essays include those by Diane Stevenson, Charles Warren, Anke Brouwers and Tom Paulus, William Rothman, Morgan Bird, and George Toles.
"Why Not Realize Your World?" Philosopher/Film Scholar William Rothman Interviewed by Jeffrey Crouse" in Film International, Issue 54, Vol. 9, No. 6 (2011): 59–73.
Special Section on Stanley Cavell. Film-Philosophy, Vol. 18 (2014): 1-171. Articles by William Rothman, Robert Sinnerbrink, David Macarthur, Richard Rushton, and Lisa Trahair.
"In Focus: Cavell in Words," Philosophy and Literature, Vol. 40, No. 2 (2016): 446-94. Three essays by, respectively, Áine Mahon and Fergal McHugh, Peter Dula, and Erika Kidd.