Stanley Cavell
Stanley Louis Cavell (September 1, 1926 – June 19, 2018) was an American philosopher. He is the Walter M. Cabot Professor Emeritus of Aesthetics and the General Theory of Value at Harvard University.
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Quotes
[edit]- The achievement of happiness requires not the ... satisfaction of our needs ... but the examination and transformation of those needs.
- Pursuits of Happiness (1984)
- I know how to give the meaning of a word but not how to give the intention of a word.
- The Division of Talent (1985)
- The crucified human body is our best picture of the unacknowledged human soul.
- The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality, and Tragedy (Oxford: 1979), p. 430
About Cavell
[edit]- Stanley Cavell once asked me if I remembered what text first attracted me to his work. I certainly did: "Philosophy and the Arrogation of Voice," the first of the three essays making up A Pitch of Philosophy: Autobiographical Exercises. He was surprised: he hadn't met anyone who had come to his philosophy through that essay. And no wonder. For a newcomer in Cavell's world, "Philosophy and the Arrogation of Voice" is almost impossible to read. It explicitly sets out to do a "recounting" of some of Cavell's work. To someone who missed the original "counting" this makes it both forbidding and foreboding. On my first reading, I only understood the odd sentence here and there. But that was enough. The essay grabbed hold of me, and wouldn't let me go. It convinced me that this man, this Stanley Cavell, had something to say, something I desperately needed to hear.
