The Senses of Walden

The Senses of Walden PDF Author: Stanley Cavell
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226098133
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 178

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Book Description
This collection of essays explores Thoreau's Walden, and discusses the importance of Thoreau and Emerson on American thought.

The Senses of Walden

The Senses of Walden PDF Author: Stanley Cavell
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226098133
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 178

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Book Description
This collection of essays explores Thoreau's Walden, and discusses the importance of Thoreau and Emerson on American thought.

Thoreau's Importance for Philosophy

Thoreau's Importance for Philosophy PDF Author: Rick Anthony Furtak
Publisher: Fordham Univ Press
ISBN: 0823239306
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 313

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Book Description
Although Henry David Thoreau's best-known book, Walden, is admired as a classic work of American literature, it has not yet been widely recognized as an important philosophical text. In fact, many academic philosophers would be reluctant to classify Thoreau as a philosopher at all. The purpose of this volume is to remedy this neglect, to explain Thoreau's philosophical significance, and to argue that we can still learn from his polemical conception of philosophy.Thoreau sought to establish philosophy as a way of life and to root our philosophical, conceptual affairs in more practical or existential concerns. His work provides us with a sustained meditation on the importance of leading our lives with integrity, avoiding what he calls "quiet desperation." The contributors to this volume approach Thoreau's writings from different angles. They explore his aesthetic views, his naturalism, his theory of self, his ethical principles, and his political stances. Most importantly, they show how Thoreau returns philosophy to its roots as the love of wisdom.

Emerson’s Transcendental Etudes

Emerson’s Transcendental Etudes PDF Author: Stanley Cavell
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 9780804745437
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 300

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Book Description
This book is Stanley Cavell’s definitive expression on Emerson. Over the past thirty years, Cavell has demonstrated that he is the most emphatic and provocative philosophical critic of Emerson that America has yet known. The sustained effort of that labor is drawn together here for the first time into a single volume, which also contains two previously unpublished essays and an introduction by Cavell that reflects on this book and the history of its emergence. Students and scholars working in philosophy, literature, American studies, history, film studies, and political theory can now more easily access Cavell’s luminous and enduring work on Emerson. Such engagement should be further complemented by extensive indices and annotations. If we are still in doubt whether America has expressed itself philosophically, there is perhaps no better space for inquiry than reading Cavell reading Emerson.

Excursions with Thoreau

Excursions with Thoreau PDF Author: Edward F. Mooney
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1501305654
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 291

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Book Description
"A literary and philosophical exploration of Thoreau as a prose-poet and religious adept who carries us into fresh and unexpected communion with landscape, seascape, open sky, and what he calls "the unfathomable.""--

This New Yet Unapproachable America

This New Yet Unapproachable America PDF Author: Stanley Cavell
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022603741X
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 137

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Book Description
Stanley Cavell is a titan of the academic world; his work in aesthetics and philosophy has shaped both fields in the United States over the past forty years. In this brief yet enlightening collection of lectures, Cavell investigates the work of two of his most tried-and-true subjects: Emerson and Wittgenstein. Beginning with an introductory essay that places his own work in a philosophical and historical context, Cavell guides his reader through his thought process when composing and editing his lectures while making larger claims about the influence of institutions on philosophers, and the idea of progress within the discipline of philosophy. In “Declining Decline,” Cavell explains how language modifies human existence, looking specifically at the culture of Wittgenstein’s writings. He draws on Emerson, Thoreau, and many others to make his case that Wittgenstein can indeed be viewed as a “philosopher of culture.” In his final lecture, “Finding as Founding,” Cavell writes in response to Emerson’s “Experience,” and explores the tension between the philosopher and language—that he or she must embrace language as his or her “form of life,” while at the same time surpassing its restrictions. He compares finding new ideas to discovering a previously unknown land in an essay that unabashedly celebrates the power and joy of philosophical thought.

The Senses of Walden

The Senses of Walden PDF Author: Stanley Cavell
Publisher: Viking
ISBN:
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 138

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Book Description
Stanley Cavell, one of America's most distinguished philosophers, has written an invaluable companion volume to Walden, a seminal book in our cultural heritage. This expanded edition includes two essays on Emerson.

Themes Out of School

Themes Out of School PDF Author: Stanley Cavell
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 9780226097886
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 430

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Book Description
In the first essay of this book, Stanley Cavell characterizes philosophy as a "willingness to think not about something other than what ordinary human beings think about, but rather to learn to think undistractedly about things that ordinary human beings cannot help thinking about, or anyway cannot help having occur to them, sometimes in fantasy, sometimes as a flash across a landscape." Fantasies of film and television and literature, flashes across the landscape of literary theory, philosophical discourse, and French historiography give Cavell his starting points in these twelve essays. Here is philosophy in and out of "school," understood as a discipline in itself or thought through the works of Shakespeare, Molière, Kierkegaard, Thoreau, Brecht, Makavejev, Bergman, Hitchcock, Astaire, and Keaton.

Cavell on Film

Cavell on Film PDF Author: William Rothman
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 0791483401
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 432

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Book Description
This extensive collection offers a substantially complete retrospective of Stanley Cavell's previously uncollected writings on film. Cavell is the only major philosopher in the Anglo-American tradition who has made film a central concern of his work, and his work offers inspiration and new directions to the field of film studies. The essays and other writings in this volume, presented in the order of their composition, range from major theoretical statements and extended critical studies of individual films or filmmakers to occasional pieces, all of which illuminate Cavell's practice of philosophy as it has developed in the more than three decades since the publication of The World Viewed. All periods of Cavell's career are represented, from the 1970s to the present, and the book includes many previously unpublished essays written since the early 1990s. In his introduction, William Rothman provides a useful and eloquent overview of Cavell's work on film and his aims as a philosopher more generally.

Philosophy the Day After Tomorrow

Philosophy the Day After Tomorrow PDF Author: Stanley Cavell
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 9780674022324
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 332

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Book Description
Seeking for philosophy the same spirit and assurance conveyed by artists like Fred Astaire, Cavell presents essays exploring the meaning of grace and gesture in film and on stage, in language and in life. Critical to the renaissance in American thought Cavell hopes to provoke is the recognition of the centrality of the “ordinary” to American life.

Becoming Who We Are

Becoming Who We Are PDF Author: Andrew Norris
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190673966
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 329

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Book Description
While much literature exists on the work of Stanley Cavell, this is the first monograph on his contribution to politics and practical philosophy. As Andrew Norris demonstrates, though skepticism is Cavell's central topic, Cavell understands it not as an epistemological problem or position, but as an existential one. The central question is not what we know or fail to know, but to what extent we have made our lives our own, or failed to do so. Accordingly, Cavell's reception of Austin and Wittgenstein highlights, as other readings of these figures do not, the uncanny nature of the ordinary, the extent to which we ordinarily fail to mean what we say and be who we are. Becoming Who We Are charts Cavell's debts to Heidegger and Thompson Clarke, even as it allows for a deeper appreciation of the extent to which Cavell's Emersonian Perfectionism is a rewriting of Rousseau's and Kant's theories of autonomy. This in turn opens up a way of understanding citizenship and political discourse that develops points made more elliptically in the work of Hannah Arendt, and that contrasts in important ways with the positions of liberal thinkers like John Rawls and Jürgen Habermas on the one hand, and radical democrats like Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe on the other.