Hagberg Garry L. (Ed.) Stanley Cavell on Aesthetic Understanding

Palgrave Macmillan, 2018. — 384 p. — ISBN: 3319974653.This book investigates the scope and significance of Stanley Cavell’s lifelong and lasting contribution to aesthetic understanding. Focusing on various strands of the rich body of Cavell’s philosophical work, the authors explore connections between his wide-ranging writings on literature, music, film, opera, autobiography, Wittgenstein, and Austin to contemporary currents in aesthetic thinking. Most centrally, the writings brought together here from an international team of senior, mid-career, and emerging scholars, explore the illuminating power of Cavell’s work for our deeper and richer comprehension of the intricate relations between aesthetic and ethical understanding. The chapters show what aesthetic understanding consists of, how such understanding might be articulated in the tradition of Cavell following Wittgenstein and J. L. Austin, and why this mode of human understanding is particularly important. At a time of quickening interest in Cavell and the tradition of which he is a central part and present-day leading exponent, this book offers insight into the deepest contributions of a major American philosopher and the profound role that aesthetic experience can play in the humane understanding of persons, society, and culture.I Want to Know More About You: On Knowing and Acknowledging in Chinatown.
Other Minds and Unknown Women: The Case of Gaslight.
The Melodrama of the Unknown Man.
Cordelia’s Moral Incapacity in King Lear.
Disowning Certainty: Tragic and Comic Skepticism in Cavell, Montaigne, and Shakespeare.
Must We Mean What We Sing? — Così Fan Tutte and the Lease of Voice.
What Matters: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Importance.
Achilles’ Tears: Cavell, the Iliad, and Possibilities for the Human.
Wittgenstein “amid” Life, Death, Sanity, Madness — and Mathematics.
Fraudulence, Knowledge, and Post-Imperial Geographies in John Le Carré’s Fiction: A Cavellian Postcolonial Reading.
Must We Do What We Say? The Plight of Marriage and Conversation in George Meredith’s The Egoist.
Within the Words of Henry James: Cavell as Austinian Reader.