Stanley Cavell on Aesthetic Understanding

375 Pages·2018·2.74 MB·English

by  Garry L. Hagberg

Philosophers
in
Depth
Stanley Cavell
on Aesthetic
Understanding
Edited by
Garry L. Hagberg
Philosophers in Depth
Series Editor
Constantine Sandis
Department of Philosophy
University of Hertfordshire
Hatfield, UK
Philosophers in Depth is a series of themed edited collections focusing on
particular aspects of the thought of major figures from the history of phi-
losophy. The volumes showcase a combination of newly commissioned
and previously published work with the aim of deepening our understand-
ing of the topics covered. Each book stands alone, but taken together the
series will amount to a vast collection of critical essays covering the history
of philosophy, exploring issues that are central to the ideas of individual
philosophers. This project was launched with the financial support of the
Institute for Historical and Cultural Research at Oxford Brookes
University, for which we are very grateful.
More information about this series at
http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14552
Garry L. Hagberg
Editor
Stanley Cavell on
Aesthetic
Understanding
Editor
Garry L. Hagberg
Bard College
Annandale-on-Hudson
NY, USA
Philosophers in Depth
ISBN 978-3-319-97465-1 ISBN 978-3-319-97466-8 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-97466-8
Library of Congress Control Number: 2018952592
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C
ontents
Part I Understanding Persons Through Film 1
1 I Want to Know More About You: On Knowing and
Acknowledging in Chinatown 3
Francey Russell
2 Other Minds and Unknown Women: The Case of Gaslight 37
Jay R. Elliott
3 The Melodrama of the Unknown Man 57
Peter Dula
Part II Shakespeare, Opera, and Philosophical Interpretation 73
4 Cordelia’s Moral Incapacity in King Lear 75
David A. Holiday
5 Disowning Certainty: Tragic and Comic Skepticism in
Cavell, Montaigne, and Shakespeare 109
V. Stanley Benfell
v
vi CONTENTS
6 Must We Mean What We Sing?—Così Fan Tutte and the
Lease of Voice 133
Ian Ground
Part III Aesthetic Understanding and Moral Life 165
7 What Matters: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Importance 167
Sandra Laugier
8 Achilles’ Tears: Cavell, the Iliad, and Possibilities for the
Human 197
David LaRocca
9 Wittgenstein “in the Midst of” Life, Death, Sanity,
Madness—and Mathematics 239
Richard McDonough
Part IV Reading Fiction and Literary Understanding 263
10 Fraudulence, Knowledge, and Post-Imperial Geographies
in John Le Carré’s Fiction: A Cavellian Postcolonial
Reading 265
Alan Johnson
11 Must We Do What We Say? The Plight of Marriage and
Conversation in George Meredith’s The Egoist 293
Erin Greer
12 Within the Words of Henry James: Cavell as Austinian
Reader 321
Garry L. Hagberg
Index 357
n C
otes on ontributors
V. Stanley Benfell is a Humanities Professor of Comparative Literature
at Brigham Young University, where he is the Head of the Comparative
Literature Program. He is the author of The Biblical Dante (2011) as well
as articles and book chapters on medieval and early modern literature and
its relationship to religious and philosophical texts and ideas. He is cur-
rently at work on a study of philosophical skepticism and early modern
comedy.
Peter  Dula is Professor of Religion and Culture and Chair of the
Department of Bible and Religion at Eastern Mennonite University in
Harrisonburg, Virginia. He is the author of Cavell, Companionship, and
Christian Theology (2011).
Jay R. Elliott is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Bard College. He
is the author of Character (2017) and co-editor of the Norton Anthology
of Western Philosophy: After Kant: The Analytic Tradition.
Erin Greer is an Assistant Professor of Literature at the University of
Texas at Dallas. Her current book project stages a dialogue between liter-
ary and philosophical texts in order to develop a theory of “conversation”
as a medium central to intimate and political life. Her fields of research and
teaching include late Victorian through contemporary British and
Anglophone literature, new media, ordinary language philosophy, politi-
cal philosophy, and gender and sexuality studies.
vii
viii NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
Ian Ground has, over the last 30 years, taught philosophy at a number of
institutions including Newcastle, Durham, the Open University,
Edinburgh, and Sunderland University. He has published in the philoso-
phy of mind, especially our understanding of animal minds, in the philoso-
phy of art, and on the thought and life of the philosopher Ludwig
Wittgenstein and is a regular reviewer for The Times Literary Supplement.
His books include Art or Bunk?, Can We Understand Animal Minds?, and
Portraits of Wittgenstein, a comprehensive collection of memoirs. He is
currently a Visiting Research Fellow in Philosophy at the University of
Hertfordshire, a Visiting Lecturer at Newcastle University, and Vice-
President of the British Wittgenstein Society.
Garry L. Hagberg is the James H. Ottaway Professor of Philosophy and
Aesthetics at Bard College and has also been Professor of Philosophy at
the University of East Anglia. Author of numerous papers at the intersec-
tion of aesthetics and the philosophy of language, his books include
Meaning and Interpretation: Wittgenstein, Henry James, and Literary
Knowledge; Art as Language: Wittgenstein, Meaning, and Aesthetic Theory;
and Describing Ourselves: Wittgenstein and Autobiographical Consciousness.
He is an editor of Art and Ethical Criticism and of Fictional Characters,
Real Problems: The Search for Ethical Content in Literature, co-editor of A
Companion to the Philosophy of Literature, and editor of the journal
Philosophy and Literature. He is presently writing a new book on the con-
tribution literary experience makes to the formation of self and sensibility,
Living in Words: Literature, Autobiographical Language, and the
Composition of Selfhood, as well as a series of articles on the exploration of
self-constitution in film and a monograph on aesthetic issues in jazz
improvisation.
David A. Holiday received his B.A. in Philosophy and Psychology from
Balliol College, Oxford, an M.Sc. in Philosophy from Edinburgh
University, and a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago. He is currently
serving as a Postdoctoral Ethics Fellow in the Jackson Center for Ethics
and Values at Coastal Carolina University, South Carolina. He teaches and
conducts research in normative ethics and moral philosophy, concentrat-
ing on moral psychology, action theory, and the history of ethics, and the
philosophy of human rights, where he focuses on the foundational norma-
tive concepts that help orient, shape, and direct contemporary discourse
and practice in global justice.
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS ix
Alan Johnson is a Professor of English at Idaho State University, where
he specializes in postcolonial literature, with a focus on India, where he
was raised. He did a Fulbright there in 2010, and again in 2016–17. He
has published on a range of topics, and his 2011 book Out of Bounds
focuses on the role that ideas of colonial Indian spaces played in the litera-
ture of British India. He is currently working on forest imagery in Indian
literature. His chapter here grew out of an introductory class on spy fiction
he taught as part of a series on the genre sponsored by ISU’s College of
Arts and Letters, and instigated by his colleagues Jennifer Attebery, Pamela
Park, and Dan Hunt.
David LaRocca is the author of On Emerson and Emerson’s English Traits
and the Natural History of Metaphor, co-editor of A Power to Translate the
World, and editor of The Bloomsbury Anthology of Transcendental Thought:
From Antiquity to the Anthropocene, Stanley Cavell’s Emerson’s
Transcendental Etudes, Estimating Emerson: An Anthology of Criticism
from Carlyle to Cavell, The Philosophy of Charlie Kaufman, The Philosophy
of War Films, and, most recently, The Philosophy of Documentary Film:
Image, Sound, Fiction, Truth. He has served as Visiting Assistant Professor
in the Cinema Department at Binghamton University, Visiting Assistant
Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the State University of
New York College at Cortland, Visiting Scholar in the Department of
English at Cornell University, and Lecturer in Screen Studies in the
Department of Cinema, Photography, and Media Arts at the Roy H. Park
School of Communications at Ithaca College. Educated at Buffalo,
Berkeley, Vanderbilt, and at Harvard, where he was also Sinclair Kennedy
Traveling Fellow in the United Kingdom, his articles have appeared in
Afterimage; Epoché; Liminalities; Post Script; Religions; Transactions; Film
and Philosophy; The Senses and Society; The Midwest Quarterly; Journalism,
Media and Cultural Studies; The Journal of Religion and Business Ethics;
The Journal of Aesthetic Education; and The Journal of Aesthetics and Art
Criticism. More details at www.davidlarocca.org.
Sandra Laugier is a French philosopher working on moral philosophy,
philosophy of language, philosophy of action, and gender studies. She is
currently a professor at the University of Paris I Pantheon-Sorbonne,
member of Institut Universitaire de France, and Deputy Director of the
Sorbonne Institute for Legal and Philosophical Sciences (ISJPS), after
being a professor at the University of Picardie Jules Verne in Amiens,
France (until 2010). She has worked extensively on J.L. Austin and