Contending with Stanley Cavell

Front Cover
Russell B. Goodman
Oxford University Press, 2005 M02 10 - 216 pages
Stanley Cavell has been a brilliant, idiosyncratic, and controversial presence in American philosophy, literary criticism, and cultural studies for years. Even as he continues to produce new writing of a high standard -- an example of which is included in this collection -- his work has elicited responses from a new generation of writers in Europe and America. This collection showcases this new work, while illustrating the variety of Cavell's interests: in the "ordinary language" philosophy of Wittgenstein and Austin, in film criticism and theory, in literature, psychoanalysis, and the American transcendentalism of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. The collection also reprints Richard Rorty's early review of Cavell's magnum opus, The Claim of Reason (1979), and it concludes with Cavell's substantial set of responses to the essays, a highlight of which is his engagement with Rorty.
 

Contents

Introduction
3
1 Cavell on Skepticism
10
2 On Refusing to Begin
22
3 Cavells Romanticism and Cavells Romanticism
37
4 Cavell and the Concept of America
55
Austin after Cavell
82
6 Cavell and American Philosophy
100
Stanley Cavell and Film Interpretation
118
8 The Avoidance of Stanley Cavell
140
9 Responses
157
Morals of Encounter
177
Selected Bibliography
199
Index
201
Copyright

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About the author (2005)

Russell B. Goodman grew up in New York, and studied philosophy at Oxford and Johns Hopkins. He has written Wittgenstein and William James (Cambridge 2002) and American Philosophy and the Romantic Tradition (Cambridge 1990), and is the editor of Pragmatism: A Contemporary Reader (Routledge, 1995). In 2003 he directed a National Endowment for the Humanities summer institute on Ralph Waldo Emerson.

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