The Cavell Reader

A personal glimpse inside the mind of a leading philosopher

The Cavell Reader is an introduction to one of the 20th century's most influential American philosophers. Stanley Cavell was well-known for the broad scope of his writing, which is a major theme of this book; topics include aesthetics, psychoanalysis, film theory, literary criticism, religion, Austin, Emerson, Wittgenstein, and more. Presented in a sequence that illustrates Cavell's evolution of thought through key periods and phases, these pieces provide an overview of the man behind the words, and serve as an introduction to his more famous philosophical work.

Introduction 1

Prologue: The Avoidance of Love (The Abdication Scene) 22

1. The Normal and the Natural 31

2. Knowing and Acknowledging 46

3. "The Frog and the Craftsman" 72

4. The Avoidance of Love (External-World Skepticism) 89

5. Ending the Waiting Game 94

6. Music Discomposed 113

7. Kierkegaard's On Authority and Revelation 127

8. The Avoidance of Love (Theater) 143

9. "Photograph, Screen, and Star" 156

10. The Same and Different: The Awful Truth 167

11. Macbeth Appalled 197

12. Psychoanalysis and Cinema: The Melodrama of the Unknown Woman 221

13. The Ordinary as the Uneventful 253

14. Words and Sentences 260

15. Being Odd, Getting Even 295

16. Declining Decline 321

17. Moral Perfectionism 353

Epilogue: The Investigations' Everyday Aesthetics of Itself 369

Stanley Cavell: A Bibliography 1951-1995 390

Index of Themes and Concepts 415

Index of Names and Titles 418

Stephen Mulhall is Reader Philosophy at Essex University and a Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford. He is the author of On Being in the World.