Stanley Cavell

Philosopher Class of 1992
location icon Location
Cambridge, Massachusetts
age iconAge
66 at time of award
age iconDate Deceased
June 19, 2018
area of focus iconArea of Focus

About Stanley's Work

Stanley Cavell is a scholar who applies the traditions of analytic philosophy to a broad range of subjects.

Cavell’s interests include film criticism, literary and psychoanalytic theory, American studies, and morality.  He has examined how dramatic literature, especially that of Shakespeare, bears on the problems of human knowledge and how central traditions in Western philosophy are interrelated.  At the core of his thought is the view that skepticism is not a theoretical position to be refuted by theory, but a reflection of the fundamental limits of human knowledge of the self, others, and the external world that must be accepted.

Cavell’s books include The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film (1971), Must We Mean What We Say? A Book of Essays (1976), Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage (1981), Disowning Knowledge: In Six Plays of Shakespeare (1987), A Pitch of Philosophy: Autobiographical Exercises (1994), Emerson's Transcendental Etudes (2003), and Cities of Words: Pedagogical Letters on a Register of the Moral Life (2004).  He is the Walter M. Cabot Professor Emeritus of Aesthetics and the General Theory of Value at Harvard University, where he has taught since 1963.

Biography

Cavell received an A.B. (1947) at the University of California at Berkeley and a Ph.D. (1961) at Harvard University.

Last updated January 1, 2005

Published on July 1, 1992

Select News Coverage of Stanley Cavell