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Stanley Cavell

A guiding theme in Stanley Cavell's work is Wittgenstein's commitment to replacing metaphysical or philosophical problems with our own ordinary needs. Finding a sense of liberation in this commitment, Cavell reads Wittgenstein as an engaging and personal philosopher who opens new conversations rather than as a deflationary thinker who brings philosophy to an end.

Cavell outlines this reading of Wittgenstein in "The Availability of Wittgenstein's Later Philosophy," which is collected in his first book, "Must We Mean What We Say?" and he develops it in the first part of his central work, "The Claim of Reason." This is the part of Cavell's work that is best-known in contemporary philosophy departments. It is a constitutive part of any study of Wittgenstein's work.

Besides recognizing the sense of liberation in Wittgenstein's work, Cavell also bears testimony to it in his other philosophical interests. Because he reads Wittgenstein as looking at our own philosophical needs, Cavell's starting point is an interrogation and articulation of his own philosophical concerns. He writes with an autobiographical voice and in a characteristic style that is attentive to his far-reaching interests. Cavell seeks to speak with and quarrel about these interests with prominent philosophers of the 20th century -- particularly John Austin -- and with other thinkers whom Cavell sees as addressing his concerns. In particular, in "The Senses of Walden" and "This New Yet Unapproachable America," Cavell engages with Thoreau and Emerson: he finds their interest in the "everyday" or the "common" as consonant with his interests in the 20th century and as an American. By engaging with them in this way, he seeks to define the "literary" character of their thought as inherently philosophical and to identify their thought as characteristically American. Cavell couples his attempt to identify the particularly American in philosophy with an attempt to clarify what is shared in the Anglo-American and Continental traditions. His powerful readings of Heidegger are a part of this attempt.

Cavell is particularly interested in identifying the ways that skepticism manifests itself in our culture. This concern has been a shaping force in his thought since his early work, as the concluding essays of "Must We Mean What We Say?" (1969), "Knowing and Acknowledging" and "The Avoidance of Love: A Reading of King Lear," as well as his later work on Shakespeare, reveal.

In "The Claim of Reason," he shows how skepticism concerning other minds leads to, and becomes tragedy. In his work on film, he interprets melodrama as an expression of skepticism (in "Contesting Tears: The Hollywood Melodrama of the Unknown Woman") and explains early Hollywood comedies as an overcoming of the skeptical impulse (in "Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage"). But his interest in film goes further and explores, especially in his early book "The World Viewed," the ontology of film.

Cavell was born in 1926, received his AB in music from the University of California at Berkeley and took a doctoral degree from Harvard in philosophy. He taught at Berkeley for six years before returning to Harvard, where he became Walter M. Cabot Professor of Aesthetics and the General Theory of Value. He became Professor Emeritus in 1997.

(Please look for "Philosophers in Conversation: Interviews from the Harvard Review of Philosophy" to be published by Routledge Press in May 2002.)