Inheriting Stanley Cavell: Memories, Dreams, Reflections

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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 Cavells 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.

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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. * Richard Eldridge, Charles and Harriett Cox McDowell Professor of Philosophy, Swarthmore College, USA *
The welcoming tone rightly identified by the editor as one genius of Stanley Cavells 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 Cavells influential philosophical writing: a style of thought inseparable from the searching prose that gave, that gives, it shape. * Garrett Stewart, James O. Freedman Professor of Letters, University of Iowa, has written most recently about Cavell in Cinemachines: An Essay on Media and Method (2020) *
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 Cavells life and his writings, and disclose an unattained but attainable future for philosophy to which we all might be attracted. * Stephen Mulhall, Fellow and Tutor in Philosophy, New College, University of Oxford, UK *
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. * George Toles, Distinguished Professor of English, Theatre, Film & Media, University of Manitoba, Canada, and author of A House Made of Light: Essays on the Art of Film (2001) *
David LaRocca has gathered together some of the worlds 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. * Catherine Wheatley, Lecturer in Film Studies, Kings College London, UK, and author of Stanley Cavell and Film: Scepticism and Self-Reliance at the Cinema (Bloomsbury, 2019) *

Author Bio

David LaRocca is the author, editor, or coeditor of eleven books. He edited Stanley Cavells Emersons 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