Remembering Stanley Cavell

Abstract

This memorial notice for Stanley Cavell was first published on the Harvard Philosophy Department website on June 25, 2018 and appears here with the department’s permission.

For over four decades one of the most distinctive and original contributors to American letters—and one of the world’s most significant proponents of what philosophy could learn from the arts—was a member of the community of Emerson Hall. But so long as Stanley Cavell is best known just as a philosopher who wrote about Shakespeare and movies (as he was first introduced to me), and even if his unassailable institutional legacy is as the advisor of generations of accomplished philosophers (and film and literary scholars), the task for philosophers memorializing Cavell is to communicate what he taught us, and in particular what he taught us to do.