Stanley Cavell

Stanley Cavell (b. 1926) is an American philosopher. Cavell is a philosopher in the critical tradition who is best known for his inclusion of film and literary study into to philosophical inquiry. He is Walter M. Cabot Professor Emeritus of Aesthetics and the General Theory of Value at Harvard University.

He is perhaps best known for his book The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality, and Tragedy (1979) which forms the centerpiece of his work. Cavell is known as a reader of the German philosophers Ludwig Wittgenstein and Martin Heidegger, and for his work on the American Transcendentalists, especially Henry Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson. His other works include:

• Must We Mean What We Say? (1969)
• The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film (1971)
• The Senses of Walden (1972)
• Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage (1981)
• Themes Out of School: Effects and Causes (1984)
• Disowning Knowledge: In Six Plays of Shakespeare (1987)
• In Quest of the Ordinary: Lines of Scepticism and Romanticism (1988)
• This New Yet Unapproachable America: Lectures after Emerson after Wittgenstein (1988)
• Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome: The Constitution of Emersonian Perfectionism (1990)
• A Pitch of Philosophy: Autobiographical Exercises (1994)
• Philosophical Passages: Wittgenstein, Emerson, Austin, Derrida (1995)
• Contesting Tears: The Melodrama of the Unknown Woman (1996)
• Emerson's Transcendental Etudes (2003)
• Cities of Words: Pedagogical Letters on a Register of the Moral Life (2004)

A recent work is Cities of Words where he traces the history of what he calls "moral perfectionism" and builds a case that it rests in the idea of making the moral intelligible both to the self and to others through conversation. That this connection with others provides the basis for the The Good Life.