Stanley Cavell's writing-somehow always precise and personal-addresses an uncanny range of topics, texts, questions, and problems across a series of fecund intellectual fields. Whether finding his way in the prose of Emerson and Thoreau, the puzzles posed by Austin and Wittgenstein, the witty repartee of classical Hollywood comedies, the linguistic marvels of Shakespeare, or the musical innovations of opera, Cavell was, almost strangely, never out of his depth.
Some of the scholars and writers of this volume are lifelong friends, students, and colleagues of Cavell's, while others are strangers and skeptical critics, but all explore moments when their personal experience of Stanley Cavell's singular philosophical and literary illuminations have, as he put it, "risen to the level of philosophical significance." Regardless of their opinion on Cavell's work, contributors to this nuanced volume have pushed back upon themselves to reflect and remember anew on what Cavell has meant and may continue to mean for generations to come.
Industry Reviews
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 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. * 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 Cavell's 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 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. * Catherine Wheatley, Lecturer in Film Studies, King's College London, UK, and author of Stanley Cavell and Film: Scepticism and Self-Reliance at the Cinema (Bloomsbury, 2019) *
