Stanley Cavell, 91; philosopher inspired by film, Shakespeare
Stanley Cavell, a onetime jazz pianist who traded music for philosophy but maintained an abiding interest in the arts, mining screwball comedies, Shakespearean dramas and postwar “new music” for philosophical insights, died June 19 at a hospital in Boston. He was 91 and had suffered a heart attack, said his son David Cavell.
Cavell taught at Harvard University for more than three decades but was often treated as something of an outsider, alternately scorned and celebrated by colleagues who noted that his books strayed far from the confines of traditional philosophy.
“Cavell is among professors of philosophy what Harold Bloom is among the professors of English: the least defended, the gutsiest, the most vulnerable. He sticks his neck out farther than any of the rest of us,” philosopher Richard Rorty once wrote in the New Republic.
While other scholars devoted decades to the subtleties of Aristotle or the intricacies of Kant, Cavell’s work encompassed a study of self-deception in “King Lear,” commentaries on the Vienna-born philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein and examinations of the links between Emerson and “The Philadelphia Story,” John Locke and “Adam’s Rib.”
A student of J.L. Austin, who sought to resolve philosophical problems by using “ordinary language” in place of academic jargon, Cavell made major contributions to the philosophy of language as well as to ethics, aesthetics and epistemology, the branch of philosophy that addresses knowledge and belief.
His first book, the 1969 essay collection “Must We Mean What We Say?,” is now considered a modern classic, acclaimed for its vivid prose style and for bridging the continental tradition of philosophers such as Kierkegaard and Heidegger with the analytic tradition of Austin and Wittgenstein.
For much of his career Cavell focused on philosophical skepticism, following Descartes and others in asking how we know whether the world is real, or how we might ever truly know another person.
In effect, said Paul Guyer, a Brown University professor of humanities and philosophy, Cavell came to believe that such certainty was unattainable.
“It’s a mistake to think that skepticism is a purely philosophical problem that can be resolved with some kind of philosophical argument,” he said in a phone interview. “Rather, we have to know that the inability to know everything about the feelings and intentions of other people, or even what our own feelings and intentions are, is a fact of human life.”
“You have to have a certain kind of trust in people,” he added, summarizing the views of his former teacher, “and if you don’t, you’re going to end up making a mess.”