Stanley Cavell on Aesthetic Understanding

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xix

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2. Understanding Persons Through Film

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 1-1

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   2. I Want to Know More About You: On Knowing and Acknowledging in Chinatown

      • Francey Russell

      Pages 3-35

   3. Other Minds and Unknown Women: The Case of Gaslight

      • Jay R. Elliott

      Pages 37-55

   4. The Melodrama of the Unknown Man

      • Peter Dula

      Pages 57-72

3. Shakespeare, Opera, and Philosophical Interpretation

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 73-73

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   2. Cordelia’s Moral Incapacity in King Lear

      • David A. Holiday

      Pages 75-108

   3. Disowning Certainty: Tragic and Comic Skepticism in Cavell, Montaigne, and Shakespeare

      • V. Stanley Benfell

      Pages 109-131

   4. Must We Mean What We Sing?—Così Fan Tutte and the Lease of Voice

      • Ian Ground

      Pages 133-164

4. Aesthetic Understanding and Moral Life

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 165-165

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   2. What Matters: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Importance

      • Sandra Laugier

      Pages 167-195

   3. Achilles’ Tears: Cavell, the Iliad, and Possibilities for the Human

      • David LaRocca

      Pages 197-237

   4. Wittgenstein “in the Midst of” Life, Death, Sanity, Madness—and Mathematics

      • Richard McDonough

      Pages 239-262

5. Reading Fiction and Literary Understanding

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 263-263

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   2. Fraudulence, Knowledge, and Post-Imperial Geographies in John Le Carré’s Fiction: A Cavellian Postcolonial Reading

      • Alan Johnson

      Pages 265-292

   3. Must We Do What We Say? The Plight of Marriage and Conversation in George Meredith’s The Egoist

      • Erin Greer

      Pages 293-320

   4. Within the Words of Henry James: Cavell as Austinian Reader

      • Garry L. Hagberg

      Pages 321-355

6. Back Matter

   Pages 357-365

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This book investigates the scope and significance of Stanley Cavell’s lifelong and lasting contribution to aesthetic understanding. Focusing on various strands of the rich body of Cavell’s philosophical work, the authors explore connections between his wide-ranging writings on literature, music, film, opera, autobiography, Wittgenstein, and Austin to contemporary currents in aesthetic thinking. Most centrally, the writings brought together here from an international team of senior, mid-career, and emerging scholars, explore the illuminating power of Cavell’s work for our deeper and richer comprehension of the intricate relations between aesthetic and ethical understanding. The chapters show what aesthetic understanding consists of, how such understanding might be articulated in the tradition of Cavell following Wittgenstein and J. L. Austin, and why this mode of human understanding is particularly important. At a time of quickening interest in Cavell and the tradition of which he is acentral part and present-day leading exponent, this book offers insight into the deepest contributions of a major American philosopher and the profound role that aesthetic experience can play in the humane understanding of persons, society, and culture. 

• aesthetics
• ethics
• philosophy
• interdisciplinary
• literature
• film

• Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY, USA

  Garry L. Hagberg

Garry L. Hagberg is the James H. Ottaway Professor of Philosophy and Aesthetics at Bard College, USA. Previous publications include Art as Language: Wittgenstein, Meaning, and Aesthetic Theory, Meaning and Interpretation: Wittgenstein, Henry James, and Literary Knowledge (1998), and Describing Ourselves: Wittgenstein and Autobiographical Consciousness (2008). He has contributed to various journals, collections, and reference works, and is Editor of the journal Philosophy and Literature. He also recently edited Wittgenstein on Aesthetic Understanding (Palgrave, 2017) for the Philosophers in Depth book series, and is presently writing a new book on the contribution literary experience makes to the formation of self and sensibility, Living in Words: Literature, Autobiographical Language, and the Composition of Selfhood (forthcoming).

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