Inheriting Stanley Cavell

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 of 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) *