ABSTRACT

Stanley Louis Cavell (b. 1926) is, as of this writing, Walter M. Cabot Professor of Aesthetics and the General Theory of Value, Emeritus, at Harvard University. He received a Ph.D. in philosophy from Harvard University in 1961, with a dissertation on skepticism and rationality in the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951), which he later published as The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality, and Tragedy,1 a book which is widely regarded as the centerpiece of Cavell’s wide ranging corpus. In addition to his work on Wittgenstein, however, Cavell has published in the fields of ordinary language philosophy (Must We Mean What We Say?, In Quest of the Ordinary),2 the history of American thought (The Senses of Walden, Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome, Emerson’s Transcendental Etudes),3 and the philosophy of film (The World Viewed, Pursuits of Happiness, Contesting Tears).4 Even this is only a partial and incomplete inventory of Cavell’s work, which is not only voluminous but interdisciplinary and, at times, nondisciplinary or anti-disciplinary in nature.