scholarly journals Stanley Cavell, Philosopher Untamed

2020 ◽  
pp. 43-45
Author(s):  
Lindsay Waters
Keyword(s):  
Hilary Putnam ◽  
Stanley Cavell ◽  
The World

Why not use the word “star,” Stanley asked in his breakthrough book on movies, The World Viewed, why not “the more beautiful and more accurate word,” rather than actor or actress? In philosophy he was a Hepburn, a Brando, a Dean, a Bacall, stars into whose souls he gave us entryways. I always thought of him and Hilary Putnam as the “glimmer twins.” Time was on their side, for so many decades, thank the lord. And on ours, too!

: The World Viewed . Stanley Cavell.

1972 ◽  
Vol 25 (4) ◽  
pp. 28-29
Author(s):  
Leo Braudy
Keyword(s):  
Stanley Cavell ◽  
The World

I Love You. Who Are You? The Strategy of Drama in Recognition Scenes

PMLA ◽  
1977 ◽  
Vol 92 (2) ◽  
pp. 297-306
Author(s):  
Helene Keyssar
Keyword(s):  
King Lear ◽  
Audience Participation ◽  
Stanley Cavell ◽  
The World ◽  
The Spectator ◽  
Critical Process

Audience participation in theater often obscures or confuses the magical nature of the activity of theater. The uniqueness of this activity is centered in the separateness of the world of the play from the world of the audience, as Stanley Cavell remarks. The importance of such separateness becomes vivid in recognition scenes which are the structural core of most drama. Aristotle perceives the importance of recognition scenes, but does not show adequately what such scenes do to the spectator. The recognition scenes in Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex and Shakespeare’s King Lear reveal drama’s special ability to allow the spectator to acknowledge another while himself remaining private. The critical process involved in coming to such an understanding of drama, while similar to some elements of structuralistic analysis, focuses more directly on a concern with the patterns of relationship between play and audience. My methodology corresponds to Stanley Fish’s “affective” stylistics.

"The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film," by Stanley Cavell

1973 ◽  
Vol 50 (4) ◽  
pp. 384-385
Author(s):  
William L. Blizek ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Stanley Cavell ◽  
The World

Moral Philosophy after Austin and Wittgenstein: Stanley Cavell and Donald MacKinnon

2017 ◽  
Vol 31 (1) ◽  
pp. 49-64
Author(s):  
Andrew D. Bowyer
Keyword(s):  
Moral Philosophy ◽  
North American ◽  
Moral Realism ◽  
Political Liberalism ◽  
Moral Discourse ◽  
Stanley Cavell ◽  
The World ◽  
The New Testament ◽  
Christian Socialism ◽  
1960S And 1970S

There are broad commonalities between the projects of Donald MacKinnon (1913–1994) and Stanley Cavell (1926–) sufficient to make the claim that they struck an analogous pose in their respective contexts. This is not to discount their manifest differences. In the milieu of 1960s and 1970s Cambridge, MacKinnon argued in support of a qualified language of metaphysics in the service of a renewed catholic humanism and Christian socialism. At Harvard, Cavell articulated commitments that made him more at home in the world of North American secular political liberalism. Where Nietzsche, Hume, Freud, Heidegger, Emerson and Thoreau were Cavell’s inspirations, Butler, Kant, G. E. Moore, Collingwood and the New Testament were MacKinnon’s. For all the stark differences, commonalities abound and the reason for this can be traced to a shared appreciation of Austin’s contribution to the ‘lingusitic turn’ together with Wittgenstein’s later work. They both developed projects obsessed with the problem of scepticism together with a commitment to a creative re-animation of moral discourse in light of it, with MacKinnon defending a qualified ‘moral realism’, and Cavell, ‘moral perfectionism’. Seen together, a distinctive post-Kantian and post-Wittgensteinian therapeutic moral philosophy is in evidence.

From Figures of Paradox to a Philosophy of Review

2020 ◽  
pp. 206-254
Author(s):  
Rebecca A. Sheehan
Keyword(s):  
Fractal Theory ◽  
Film Theory ◽  
Incompleteness Theorem ◽  
Stanley Cavell ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
The World ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Spectator ◽  
Zeno's Paradox

This chapter examines the role of paradox in the films and film theory of Ken Jacobs, Hollis Frampton, and Michael Snow. Paradoxes such as Zeno’s paradox, Gödel’s incompleteness theorem, and Benoît Mandelbrot’s fractal theory of geometry, which inform the work of these filmmakers, propose and repeat the unresolvable gap between subject and world that informs skepticism. This chapter argues that the skeptical encounters these films invite, which entice the spectator to work toward solving a riddle or problem of incompleteness, also provide a model for overcoming skepticism by prompting re-encounters with the images on screen and the world to which they refer. These re-encounters occur in the same way that Stanley Cavell imagined the images of mainstream cinema could overcome problems of philosophical skepticism by drawing the subject closer to the world. The author argues, however, that these avant-garde meditations on mises en abyme are possibly more effective than Hollywood filmmaking for overcoming skepticism because of their more immediate emphasis on cinema’s very ability to engage and stage re-encounters between the subject and the limits of the world, rather than their reference to the world through images.

scholarly journals PERSPECTIVAL EXTERNALISM IS THE ANTIDOTE FOR RADICAL SKEPTICISM

Episteme ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 14 (3) ◽  
pp. 363-379 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lisa Miracchi
Keyword(s):  
Crucial Role ◽  
Hilary Putnam ◽  
Semantic Externalism ◽  
Skeptical Argument ◽  
Actual Case ◽  
Radical Skepticism ◽  
Promising Strategy ◽  
The World ◽  
Mental Events

ABSTRACTHilary Putnam (1981) provides an anti-skeptical argument motivated by semantic externalism. He argues that our best theorizing about what it takes to experience, think, and so on, entails that the world is much as we take it to be. This fact eliminates the possibility of radical skeptical scenarios, where from our perspective everything seems as it does in the actual case, but we are widely and systematically mistaken. I think that this approach is generally correct, and that it is the most promising strategy for undermining radical skepticism. There are, however, well-discussed difficulties with Putnam's way of pursuing this strategy (see especially Anthony Brueckner 1986). I argue that in order to avoid these objections we will have to be more radical externalists than Putnam proposed; in particular, we will have to beperspectival externalists. According to perspectival externalism, a subject's reliable relations to her environment play a crucial role in determining not only the contents of her mental events, but also what it is like for her to grasp those contents. While semantic externalism is widely accepted in epistemology, perspectival externalism is not. I argue that perspectival externalism is independently more plausible than mere semantic externalism, and that such an account can enable us to better pursue Putnam's anti-skeptical strategy.

God and other programs

1979 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
pp. 83-89 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marie-Louise Friquegnon
Keyword(s):  
Computer Program ◽  
Hilary Putnam ◽  
Other Minds ◽  
Alvin Plantinga ◽  
Analogical Inference ◽  
Belief In God ◽  
Teleological Argument ◽  
The World ◽  
Central Argument ◽  
Analogical Argument

In God and Other Minds, Alvin Plantinga formulated an ingenious defence of the teleological argument for the belief in God, based on alleged similarities to the analogical argument for other minds. I shall state what I take to be Plantinga's central argument and then I shall criticize it on two counts: 1. Even if Plantinga's claims about the similarities between these two famous arguments were sound, they would at most provide rational support for pantheism, but not for the traditional Judaeo-Christian theism that Plantinga attempts to defend; and 2. The similarities alleged by Plantinga do not in fact hold. The analogical inference to other minds is grounded on resemblance between one's own behaviour and the behaviour of others, while the teleological argument for God is grounded on resemblance between human contrivances and the world. If the teleological argument really worked, it would count against rather than being supported by the analogical argument, for it would reduce the world to a soulless machine created and programmed by God, and, by inverse inference, would strongly suggest that God himself is exactly so much of a Mind as J. C. Smart and Hilary Putnam take human minds to be, i.e. a computer program.

scholarly journals Stanley Cavell on the Magic of the Movies

2017 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
pp. 114-132 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Shaw
Keyword(s):  
Romantic Love ◽  
The Other ◽  
Individual Autonomy ◽  
Worth Living ◽  
Stanley Cavell ◽  
General Thesis ◽  
Human Value ◽  
Search For Self ◽  
Theoretical Hypothesis ◽  
The World

In order to explain Cavell's account of what makes movies so magical, this article will offer a chronological survey of his major writings on film, beginning with the first edition of The World Viewed (1971), where he poses an intriguing theoretical hypothesis about what distinguishes the movies from the other major art forms. The survey will continue by considering the expanded edition of The World Viewed (1979), Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage (1984), and Contesting Tears: The Hollywood Melodrama of the Unknown Woman (1997), and will conclude with an analysis of Cavell's discussion of Emersonian perfectionism in Cities of Words (2005). Throughout, I show how the specific film interpretations he proposes serve as archetypal examples of crucial features of his philosophy. Cavell's general thesis, I take it, is that films can pose particularly satisfying responses to the skepticism we all harbour about our most deeply held values. In a nutshell, the movies are magical because they tell us myths that allow us to see our lives as worth living, helping to restore our faith in the wellsprings of human value: romantic love, individual autonomy, nonconformity, and the search for self-improvement.

scholarly journals Religion som verdenshåndtering

2014 ◽  
Vol 77 (1) ◽  
pp. 27-45
Author(s):  
Troels Engberg-Pedersen
Keyword(s):  
Hilary Putnam ◽  
The World ◽  
Science Building

The article discusses two questions: whether (and in whatsense) Christianity can be ‘naturalized’; and whether ancient Stoicismmay contribute to a modern reformulation of ‘Christianity naturalized’.To answer these questions, the article focuses on articulating an understandingof ‘religion’ in relation to ‘science’. Building on the accountgiven of the philosophical discipline of ‘ethics’ by Hilary Putnam inEthics without Ontology, the article attempts to construct a structurallysimilar understanding of ‘religion’ (and its philosophical counterpart,‘theology’) that will give it a legitimate position ‘in an age of science’(cf. Putnam, Philosophy in an Age of Science). ‘Religion’ is here seen asone particular way of ‘coping with the world’. The article concludesby sketching some ways in which ancient Stoicism (as a specimen of a‘natural philosophy and theology’) may help in reformulating an adequate,contemporary understanding of Christianity.

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