Inheriting Stanley Cavell

David LaRocca is the author, editor, or coeditor of eleven books. He edited Stanley Cavell’s Emerson’s Transcendental Etudes (2003), guest edited a commemorative issue of Conversations: The Journal of Cavellian Studies, and edited The Thought of Stanley Cavell and Cinema: Turning Anew to the Ontology of Film a Half-Century after The World Viewed (Bloomsbury, 2020). He has held visiting research and teaching positions at Binghamton, Cornell, Cortland, Harvard, Ithaca College, and Vanderbilt. www.DavidLaRocca.org

• INTRODUCTIONMust We Say What We Learned? Parsing the Personal and the Philosophical (David LaRocca, Cornell University, USA)I. STANDARD CONSIDERATIONS1. Must We Mean What We Say? On the Life and Thought of Stanley Cavell (Marshall Cohen, University of Southern California, USA)2. Cavell at Film Criticism: "An Unreadiness to Become Explicit" (Andrew Klevan, University of Oxford, UK)3. Cavell as Educator (Mark Greif, Stanford University, USA)4. What Cavell Made Possible for Philosophy (Susan Neiman, Einstein Forum, Germany)5. Cavell Reading Cavell (William Rothman, University of Miami, USA)II. FEATS OF ORDINARY LANGUAGE6. Cavell's Redemptive Reading (Edward T. Duffy, Marquette University, USA)7. Staging Praise / Owning Words (Charles Bernstein, University of Pennsylvania, USA)8. Resisting the Literal: Cavell’s Conversations with Thinking (Ann Lauterbach, Bard College, USA)9. Revisiting Ordinary Language Criticism (Kenneth Dauber, State University of New York at Buffalo, USA, and K. L. Evans, Independent Scholar)10. Monsters and Felicities: Vernacular Transformations of the Five-Foot Shelf (Lawrence F. Rhu, University of South Carolina, USA)III. CINEMA, MUSIC, ART, AND AESTHETICS11. The Idea that Films Could Have a Bearing on Philosophy (Robert B. Pippin, University of Chicago, USA)12. Words Fail Me. (Stanley Cavell’s Life out of Music) (William Day, Le Moyne College, USA)13. Cavell’s Ear for Things (Andreas Teuber, Brandeis University, USA)14. How to Mean It: Some Simple Lessons (Timothy Gould, Metropolitan State University of Denver, USA)15. Stanley Cavell’s Doubling (Rex Butler, Monash University, Australia)IV. THE SIGNIFICANCE OF EVERYDAY LIFE16. The Importance of Being Alive (Sandra Laugier, University of Paris 1, Panthéon-Sorbonne, France)17. Impression, Influence, Appreciation (Steven G. Affeldt, Le Moyne College, USA)18. Taking an Interest in Interest (Richard Deming, Yale University, USA)19. Philosophy and Autobiography (Toril Moi, Duke University, USA)20. Autophilosophy (David LaRocca, Cornell University, USA)AcknowledgmentsContributorsIndex

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.