Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 55, Issue 1, Page 263-281, February 2021.

Abstract Of the many ways in which identity is constructed and performed online, few are as strongly ‘anchored’ to existing offline relationships as in online social networks like Facebook and Myspace. These networks utilise profiles that extend our practical, psychological and even corporeal identity in ways that give them considerable phenomenal presence in the lives of spatially distant people. This raises interesting questions about the persistence of identity when these online profiles survive the deaths of the users behind them, via (...) the practice of ‘memorialising’ social network profile pages. I situate these practices within a phenomenology of grief that accounts for the ways in which the dead can persist as moral patients, and show how online survival in this case illuminates an important difference between persons and selves within contemporary philosophy of personal identity. Ultimately, the online persistence of the dead helps bring into view a deep ontological contradiction implicit in our dealings with death: the dead both live on as objects of duty and yet completely cease to exist. Content Type Journal Article Category Special Issue Pages 1-17 DOI 10.1007/s13347-011-0050-7 Authors Patrick Stokes, Philosophy Group, School of Humanities, University of Hertfordshire de Havilland Campus, Hatfield, Hertfordshire AL10 9AB, UK Journal Philosophy & Technology Online ISSN 2210-5441 Print ISSN 2210-5433. (shrink)

In his essay 'The Scandal of Skepticism', Stanley Cavell discusses aspects of the work of Emmanuel Levinas with a view to understanding how 'philosophical and religious ambitions so apparently different' as his own and those of Levinas can have led to 'phenomenological coincidences so precise'. The present paper explores themes of scepticism and alterity as these emerge in the work of these two increasingly influential philosophers. It shows education to be a sustained preoccupation in their work, crucially related to these (...) guiding themes. In the process it seeks to dispel certain assumptions regarding poststructuralism, on the one hand, and the religious implications of Levinas's thought, on the other. This lays the way for an account of the criticality of human being, of the significance of this for community, and of the demands this makes on education. (shrink)

This article proposes a critical presentation and development of Alain Badiou's theory of romantic love, at the center of which is an understanding of the phenomenon in terms of a truth‐generating event. I discuss this notion against the more familiar ontological modes of theorizing love: as the subject's intentional attitude and as an activity of internal value. Arguing that the evental conception of love poses a preferable alternative to the former mode, my analysis focuses on its complementary relations with the (...) latter, of which I take Stanley Cavell's theory of marriage as a representative. My further argument is concerned with the place of sexuality in the evental conception of love, compensating for what I argue to be the shortcomings of Badiou's treatment of the topic by turning to Roger Scruton's account of the immanent significance of the sexual. (shrink)

Philosophy & Social Criticism, Volume 48, Issue 6, Page 860-881, July 2022. This article aims to rewrite Emerson’s moral perfectionism – his anti-foundationalist pursuit of an always more perfect state of self and society – onto his moral and intellectual participation in the abolitionist movement. I argue that Cavell artificially separated Emerson’s moral perfectionism from his extensive, decades-long abolitionism. The source of Cavell’s oversight is his participation in the long-standing norm of dichotomizing Emerson’s work into the theoretical ‘essays’ and the (...) ‘anti-slavery writings’ or the philosophical and the polemical. Recent scholars of Emerson have questioned and even dismissed this dichotomy, however, while recentring Emerson’s politics in his oeuvre as a whole. They find much to praise, and also plenty to criticize, in Emerson’s abolitionist writings. I follow and extend that scholarly trend here and introduce what I call Emerson’s abolitionist perfectionism as an expansion of Cavell’s influential work on moral perfectionism. (shrink)

In this article I compare and contrast Hannah Arendt’s and Stanley Cavell’s understandings of critique, focusing in each case upon the role played in it by skepticism. Both writers are decisively influenced by the later Heidegger’s thought that thinking as such is, first, the necessary turn to a practice adequate to our situation and, second, something that we shun. They also share the desire to take up this Heideggerian thought in Kantian terms: what is at stake is critical thinking. It (...) is here, however, that they part ways, with Arendt insisting that critique is as incompatible with skepticism as it is with dogmatism, and Cavell insisting that skepticism is the central moment within critique. Arendt’s attempt to ban skepticism from critique forces her into the contradictory position of at once denying and affirming the role of dogma in critical thinking. Cavell, in contrast, is able to shed light consistently upon the question of how citizens might best respond to the new – a task, ironically, that is a... (shrink)

Stanley Cavell's writing on film has been an important inspiration for the recent 'philosophical turn' in film theory. But few studies have explored the significance of Cavell's style of writing, how it communicates his distinctive manner of thinking with film. This article explores Cavell's style as a way of doing philosophy, and suggests that his attempt to capture the aesthetic experience of film in evocative prose makes an important contribution to developing new ways of thinking in film-philosophy.

This paper presents and defends a reappraisal of J.L. Austin’s infamous analogy between saying ‘I know’ and ‘I promise’ in ‘Other Minds.’ The paper has four sections. In §1, I contend that the standard reading of Austin’s analogy is a strawman that distorts the terms of the analogy and superimposes philosophical commitments that Austin was precisely trying to combat. In §§2 and 3, I argue that to understand the point of the analogy we must contextualize ‘Other Minds’ as a response (...) to logical positivism. I recap A.J. Ayer’s influential account of positivism, before arguing that ‘Other Minds’ and its centrepiece analogy should be read as an attack on Austin’s colleague’s organizing positivist assumptions – specifically, descriptivism and the fact/value dichotomy that it props up. My main thesis is that Austin sought to show that epistemic discourse is imbricated with ethical commitments. This reading is anticipated by Cavell, to whom I turn in §4. I bring together insights from across Cavell’s oeuvre to develop this reading of Austin’s analogy and finally to critique certain aspects of it. This paper adds to the recent resurgence in Austin scholarship and aims to get clear the philosophical and historical stakes of his historically maligned analogy. (shrink)

How is one to navigate between a thinking grounded in the individual and a claim for communality? In Emerson, this kind of difficulty comes into view in familiar sentences such as Speak your latent conviction, and it shall be the universal sense.’ How does the relationship between the personal and the universal look and function? In this paper, it is argued that Emerson may bring us clarity regarding the difficulties we are facing when it comes to questions about how we (...) are to frame human personality, morality, and knowledge in the field of tension created by distinctions such as private/public, original/conventional, and particular/universal. A crucial thought in this line of reasoning is that that the critical philosophy Emerson pursues is also self-critical. The idea that true critique is self-criticism is then used as a tool to make clear that there’s no fundamental gap to be bridged here. The self-critical dimension makes clear the ways in which coming to share a world—learning from one’s teachers for example—is a matter of earning (shared) words. Therefore, Emersonian self-cultivation does not stand apart from the cultivation of something shared, but should be seen as a form of path towards a shared world. (shrink)

An extraordinary horde of aberrant, deformed, and grotesque beings inhabits the writings collected in the Zhuangzi. Crippled, malformed, hideous, foolish, eccentric, and even outlawed individuals conquer the central place of philosophical narration, traditionally proscribed for them, and create one of the most important and intriguing voices echoing through the text. Yet, for all their undeniably significant presence, scholars of ancient Chinese philosophy have paid surprisingly little attention to the topic of monsters. Structured into three sections and adopting a critical, strictly (...) philosophical standpoint, this paper aims to draw attention to the crucial role played by monsters in the Zhuangzi. The first section underlines the essential characteristics of these monsters and, most particularly, their disruptive dimension together with the challenge they pose to philosophical thinking. The second section offers a detailed review of the recent bibliography on the Zhuangzi with regard to analysis of these aberrant figures. Finally, based on contributions in the work of Jacques Rancière, the third section highlights the political scope embodied by the monstrous beings of the Zhuangzi. (shrink)

We critically examine pragmatism's approach to skepticism and try to elucidate its certain limits. The central questions to be addressed are: whether “skepticism” interpreted through the lens of problem-solving does justice to the human condition; and whether the problem-solving approach to skepticism can do justice to pragmatism's self-proclaimed anti-foundationalism. We then examine Stanley Cavell's criticism of Dewey's “problem-solving” approach. We propose a shift from the problem-solving approach's eagerness for solutions to a more Wittgensteinian and Emersonian project of dissolution.

The aim of this article is to describe the significance and key challenges of philosophy for managers as perceived on the basis of a particular understanding of philosophy and my personal experience as a practitioner.The paper will be more visionary than argumentative. I recognise there are important alternative approaches but I will not engage in detailed analysis of them.2Drawing heavily on my own experience, the paper will present an outline and meta-philosophy of philosophical practices that have proven useful in actual (...) interface with practising managers. (shrink)

Richard Rorty's moral writings offer a cogent summary of the moral content of contemporary liberal democratic culture. Rorty insists on a divide between our public and private lives, yet he claims that moral progress is primarily driven by the imagination of great poetry and philosophy . A pressing tension thus emerges between private imagination and public moral justification, which is also very real in contemporary liberal democratic culture itself. I sketch a way out of this problem, which fits well with (...) the pragmatism he shares with William James and John Dewey. (shrink)

This paper considers two different kinds of philosophical interpretations of the movie Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. On the one hand, Eternal Sunshine as a thought experiment that can function as an argument against utilitarianism. On the other hand, Eternal Sunshine as an instance of the genre of the remarriage comedy. I will argue that these two kinds of interpretations are in conflict. More specifically, Eternal Sunshine, understood as a comedy of remarriage, cannot function as an argument against utilitarianism, (...) at least in the sense specified by Grau and Wartenberg. Finally, I will suggest a different way in which Eternal Sunshine, understood as a comedy of remarriage, might function as an argument against utilitarianism. (shrink)

Journal of Philosophy of Education, EarlyView.

How is one to navigate between a thinking grounded in the individual and a claim for communality? In Emerson, this kind of difficulty comes into view in familiar sentences such as Speak your latent conviction, and it shall be the universal sense.’ How does the relationship between the personal and the universal look and function? In this paper, it is argued that Emerson may bring us clarity regarding the difficulties we are facing when it comes to questions about how we (...) are to frame human personality, morality, and knowledge in the field of tension created by distinctions such as private/public, original/conventional, and particular/universal. A crucial thought in this line of reasoning is that that the critical philosophy Emerson pursues is also self-critical. The idea that true critique is self-criticism is then used as a tool to make clear that there’s no fundamental gap to be bridged here. The self-critical dimension makes clear the ways in which coming to share a world—learning from one’s tea... (shrink)

In this paper I consider one aspect of how student writing is supported in the university. I focus on the use of the 'writing frame', questioning its status as a vehicle for facilitating student voice, and in the process questioning how that notion is itself understood. I illustrate this by using examples from the story of the 1944 Hollywood film Gaslight and show that apparent means of facilitating voice can actually contribute to a state of voicelessness. The paper considers what (...) recovery of voice entails and the role of the 'voice coach' both in the film, and in the classroom. Drawing on the work of Stanley Cavell, his readings of Gaslight and of the American writers Thoreau and Emerson, I explore the themes of crisis and transformation in relation to the self and society. Thoreau's notion of the father tongue and his metaphor of the axe are considered in relation to the concept of voice and are shown to be suggestive of a mature relationship to language and of an Emersonian self-reliance that is denied by the mere technical skill and mastery learning of some current approaches to academic writing. (shrink)

With specific reference to the teaching of Irish and English in Ireland, I am concerned in this paper with the experiences of language dispossession and language pedagogy. Drawing on Jacques Derrida’s key concepts of ‘hospitality’ and ‘monolingualism’, I argue that in Ireland the first of these experiences cannot be separated from the second. Taking into consideration its colonial past as well as the changing linguistic profile of its present, Ireland is at once ‘host’ and ‘hostage’ to the English language and (...) this deconstructing identity has important ramifications for the country’s systematic teaching of English as well as Irish. The primary philosophical text guiding my discussion is Derrida’s ‘Monolingualism of the Other’. (shrink)

John Rawls was what we might call a “frenemy” to Stanley Cavell. Time and again, Cavell states his admiration for Rawls's political philosophy but criticizes it for two reasons. First, he believes that Rawls too hastily dismisses a perfectionist tradition that is essential for a flourishing liberal democracy. Second, he attacks certain aspects of Rawls's theory of justice as moralistic and legalistic. The first half of this article examines Cavell's critique of Rawls and argues that the two authors are more (...) closely aligned than suspected. It begins by reconstructing Cavell's critique of Rawls, and using archival materials from Harvard University, presents for the first time Rawls's interpretation of this critique. The second half of the article highlights perfectionist themes in Rawls's A Theory of Justice. The contribution of this article is to reevaluate the relationship between two of the most important moral philosophers of the twentieth century and also to provide a more expansive theory of liberalism that incorporates the psychological depth, moral subtlety and political hopefulness of moral perfectionism. (shrink)

ABSTRACT:Stanley Cavell’s moral perfectionism places the task of cultivating richer self-understanding and self-expression at the center of corporate life. We show how his approach reframes business as an opportunity for moral soul-craft, achieved through the articulation of increasingly reflective inner life in organizational culture. Instead of norming constraints on business activity, perfectionism opens new possibilities for conducting commercial exchange as a form of conversation, leading to personal growth. This approach guides executives in designing businesses that foster genius and channel creativity, (...) while giving all stakeholders a meaningful voice within a culture of trust. We first give an account of Cavellian perfectionism. Then, we explain how this underrepresented strand of moral reflection challenges and enriches, but does not supplant, prevailing ethical theories—including other versions of perfectionism. We then demonstrate the salience of Cavellian perfectionism to business ethics through examples from marketing, human resources, and executive organizational design and development. (shrink)

This paper aims to show how Emerson provides a reworking of Kantian understandings of moral education in young children’s Bildung. The article begins and ends by thinking of Emersonian self-cultivation as a form of improvisatory or wild Bildung. It explores the role of Bildung and self-cultivation in preschools through a philosophy that accounts for children’s ‘Wild wisdom’ by letting Emerson speak to Kant. The paper argues that Kant’s vision of Bildung essentially involves reason’s turn upon itself and that Emerson, particularly (...) in how he is taken up by Cavell, shows that such a turn is already present in the processes of children inheriting, learning, and improvising with language. This improvisatory outlook on moral education is contrasted with common goals of moral education prescribed in early childhood education where the Swedish Curriculum for the Preschool Lpfö 98 is used as an example. (shrink)

This article will highlight the distinctive role of Cavell in renewing a dawn of American philosophy. Following Emerson’s remark, ‘the inmost in due time becomes the outmost’, Cavell develops his distinctive line of antifoundationalist thought. To show how unique and valuable Cavell’s endeavor to resuscitate Emerson’s and Thoreau’s voice in American philosophy is, this paper discusses the political implications of Cavell’s Emersonian moral perfectionism. This involves a reconsideration of what measures justice and what justifies happiness. While Cavell is sometimes said (...) to be too personal and too subjective to be political, I shall argue that his Emersonian perfectionism, with its concomitant idea of the conversation of justice, is in fact thoroughly political and democratic. I shall illustrate this by examining his writing on a Hollywood film, Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936). The film shows vividly that happiness is a condition for achieving democracy from within. In conclusion, I shall propose that a readiness for the risk inherent in speech, rather than, say, acquiescing in received ideas or hiding behind the words of others, is at the heart of perfectionist education for globally minded citizens. (shrink)

Engaging with the philosophical writings of Iris Murdoch, we submit that there are difficulties associated with providing a good description of morality that are intimately connected with difficulties in understanding other human beings. We suggest three senses in which moral philosophical reflection needs to account for our understanding of others: (1) the failure to understand someone is not merely an intellectual failure, but also engages us morally; (2) the moral question of understanding is not limited to the extent to which (...) we understand a particular person, but also presents itself in how we picture difficulties in understanding people; and (3) “philosophical pictures of morality” fundamentally shape the conceptual framework we use to investigate morality, as well as the analysis of morality we find illuminative and satisfactory. Exploring the implications of these claims, we ask what it means to think of others as the same, or as different, from ourselves. We then consider the ethical significance of finding, or not finding, our feet in our encounters with others, dwelling on how the metaphor of movement reveals one way in which we are never at peace in the exploration of morality. (shrink)

Interpretations of the ethical significance of the Bhagavadgītā typically understand the debate between Arjuna and Kṛṣṇa in terms of a struggle between consequentialist and deontological doctrines. In this paper, I provide instead a reading of the Gītā which draws on a conception of moral thinking that can be understood to cut across those positions – that developed by Stanley Cavell, which he calls ‘Emersonian Moral Perfectionism’. In so doing, I emphasise how Kṛṣṇa’s consolation of Arjuna can centrally and fruitfully be (...) viewed as concerned with resuscitating the latter’s individuality, thereby allowing Arjuna to overcome an unthinking conformity to the current degenerate state of his society. This leads me to explore the relation between this perfectionist understanding of spiritual reorientation and the Gītā’s religious account of human redemption; and to conclude by suggesting how the text of the Gītā itself might have similar therapeutic designs upon its readers. (shrink)

In this article, I claim that Sam Mendes' Revolutionary Road is a recent version of the film genre that Stanley Cavell calls the “melodrama of the unknown woman”. Accordingly, my discussion focuses on two key elements of that identification: the film's overriding dramatic and thematic emphasis on conversation; and the central characters’ relation to the wider social and political concerns of America.

This article critiques Stephen Mulhall's reading of Cavell's response to skepticism. In the first half of the article, I argue that Mulhall is mistaken in two respects: he elides differences Cavell notes between external world and other minds skepticism as well as conflates empathetic projection and acknowledgment. In the second half of the article, I argue for a novel reading of Cavell's account of acknowledgment, which addresses the concerns I raise for Mulhall. The paper closes by considering and responding to (...) a worry that one's efforts at acknowledgment are more complicated projections of one's self onto the other. (shrink)

By virtue of an extended consideration of problems and possibilities in the discipline of film studies toward the goal of constructing an Objectivist aesthetics of cinema, this article examines some of the most pressing issues facing contemporary art criticism. Opposing tenets of an Aristotelian aesthetic tradition against tenets of a Kantian aesthetic tradition, the author attempts to resolve a number of long-standing aporias in the Objectivist aesthetics and in the philosophy of art more broadly in the hopes of charting a (...) fruitful path for the future of art criticism. (shrink)

El presente artículo tiene como objetivo reconstruir la ética de la resistencia que Nietzsche propone en _El Anticristo _partiendo de la imagen que se ofrece en el prólogo a modo de declaración de intenciones: “preferible _vivir en medio del hielo_”. Dicha ética le exige al individuo la superación de la psicología de la convicción o de la fe y recurre, como método, a la Filología entendida como “_ephexis _en la interpretación”. La apropiación nietzscheana de ese término procedente del pirronismo obliga (...) a medir la utilidad de las enseñanzas escépticas para un individuo que aspira a autorrealizarse, _a llegar a ser el que es_. Con este fin ha de poner entre paréntesis los lugares comunes y asegurarse una posición hermenéutica propia que quiere evitar la_ des-simismación_ y que renuncia, por ello, a implicarse en la rutina democrática de las sociedades modernas. En sintonía con la sensibilidad pirrónica que anima a cultivar la distancia y la indiferencia, se acabará mostrando, en primer lugar, que Nietzsche se dirige exclusivamente a una comunidad de lectores afines y que, en segundo lugar, suspende la vocación política de su propuesta. (shrink)

This paper reconsiders the meaning of political action by way of a dialogue between Dewey, Thoreau, and Cavell. These philosophers demonstrate possibilities of political engagement and participation. Especially in response to the psychological and emotional dimensions of political crisis today, I shall claim that American philosophy can demonstrate something beyond problem-solving as conventionally understood in politics and that it has the potential to re-place philosophy in such a manner that politics itself is changed. First, I shall draw a contrast between (...) the ways of political action demonstrated respectively by Dewey and Thoreau. Some points of divergence are revealed within American philosophy. I shall then explore the partially different sense of political action implied by Cavell’s ordinary language philosophy, identifying this as the politics of acknowledgment. Finally, I shall propose the idea of challenging inclusion as an alternative political education for human transformation, taking this as a key to changing politics. (shrink)

In the practice of education and educational reforms today ‘meritocracy’ is a prevalent mode of thinking and discourse. Behind political and economic debates over the just distribution of education benefits, other kinds of philosophical issues, concerning the question of democracy, await to be addressed. As a means of evoking a language more subtle than what is offered by political and economic solutions, I shall discuss Ralph Waldo Emerson's idea of perfectionism, particularly his ideas of the ‘gleam of light’ and ‘genius’, (...) as an alternative mode of thinking of human power. Through this Emersonian lens, a provocative shift will be made from meritocracy and ‘mediocracy’ to aristocracy. Emersonian aristocracy destabilizes balanced measures and prevailing discourse about fairness and justice, and makes us reconsider how to achieve a just society in democracy. As an educational implication, I shall propose the idea of citizenship without inclusion—a vision of education for a democratic society in which we learn to live as and with the Great Man. (shrink)

This paper aims to show how Emerson provides a reworking of Kantian understandings of moral education in young children’s Bildung. The article begins and ends by thinking of Emersonian self-cultivation as a form of improvisatory or wild Bildung. It explores the role of Bildung and self-cultivation in preschools through a philosophy that accounts for children’s ‘Wild wisdom’ by letting Emerson speak to Kant. The paper argues that Kant’s vision of Bildung essentially involves reason’s turn upon itself and that Emerson, particularly (...) in how he is taken up by Cavell, shows that such a turn is already present in the processes of children inheriting, learning, and improvising with language. This improvisatory outlook on moral education is contrasted with common goals of moral education prescribed in early childhood education where the Swedish Curriculum for the Preschool Lpfö 98 is used as an example. (shrink)

This article will highlight the distinctive role of Cavell in renewing a dawn of American philosophy. Following Emerson’s remark, ‘the inmost in due time becomes the outmost’, Cavell develops his distinctive line of antifoundationalist thought. To show how unique and valuable Cavell’s endeavor to resuscitate Emerson’s and Thoreau’s voice in American philosophy is, this paper discusses the political implications of Cavell’s Emersonian moral perfectionism. This involves a reconsideration of what measures justice and what justifies happiness. While Cavell is sometimes said (...) to be too personal and too subjective to be political, I shall argue that his Emersonian perfectionism, with its concomitant idea of the conversation of justice, is in fact thoroughly political and democratic. I shall illustrate this by examining his writing on a Hollywood film, Mr. Deeds Goes to Town. The film shows vividly that happiness is a condition for achieving democracy from within. In conclusion, I shall propose that a readiness for the risk inherent in speech, rather than, say, acquiescing in received ideas or hiding behind the words of others, is at the heart of perfectionist education for globally minded citizens. (shrink)

In order to explain Cavell's account of what makes movies so magical, this article will offer a chronological survey of his major writings on film, beginning with the first edition of The World Viewed (1971), where he poses an intriguing theoretical hypothesis about what distinguishes the movies from the other major art forms. The survey will continue by considering the expanded edition of The World Viewed (1979), Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage (1984), and Contesting Tears: The Hollywood (...) Melodrama of the Unknown Woman (1997), and will conclude with an analysis of Cavell's discussion of Emersonian perfectionism in Cities of Words (2005). Throughout, I show how the specific film interpretations he proposes serve as archetypal examples of crucial features of his philosophy. Cavell's general thesis, I take it, is that films can pose particularly satisfying responses to the skepticism we all harbour about our most deeply held values. In a nutshell, the movies are magical because they tell us myths that allow us to see our lives as worth living, helping to restore our faith in the wellsprings of human value: romantic love, individual autonomy, nonconformity, and the search for self-improvement. (shrink)

In this essay, I reconsider the constitution of democratic freedom in aesthetic terms. My interest is in articulating a conception of aesthetic freedom that can be mapped onto a conception of democratic freedom. For this purpose, I bring together Charles Sanders Peirce’s ontology, which comprises fragments of an aesthetic theory, Friedrich Schiller’s concept of aesthetic play and Stanley Cavell’s democratic perfectionism. By providing a philosophical framework for constructing an aesthetics and politics that supports the recent aesthetic turn in political theory, (...) which urges overcoming political theory’s excessive dependence on an epistemological theory of representation, and by proposing a modification to the turn’s heavy reliance on theories of affect, my reading of Peirce, Schiller and Cavell offers a new way to think about the political significance of the autonomy of aesthetic experience and affect for democratic freedom. (shrink)

In this paper, I discuss the importance of practices of disidentification and imagination for democratic progress and change. To this end, I bring together certain aspects of Stanley Cavell’s and Richard Rorty’s reflections on democracy, aesthetics, and morality with Jacques Rancière’s account of the importance of appearance for democratic participation. With Rancière, it can be shown that any public–political order always involves the possibility (and often the reality) of exclusion or oppression of those who “have no part” in the current (...) order through a particular order of perceptibility, and that democratic action, therefore, requires rupturing acts of political agency on the part of self-proclaimed political actors through which disidentifications and constructions of difference against such existing orders become possible. With Cavell and Rorty, in turn, it can be shown that these rupturing moments, in order to actually become politically effective, require a responsive disposition and a willingness to engage in practices of imagination on the part of those who occupy dominant positions on existing orders, insofar as they must acknowledge the expression of others’ sense of injustice. The upshot of my discussion is that a comprehensive account of the aesthetic dimension of democratic politics must simultaneously address the interruption of political action on the one hand and responsiveness on the other, and that Rancière and the neo-pragmatists Rorty and Cavell complement each other insofar as they illuminate the blind spots of their respective approaches. (shrink)

Drawing upon Nel Noddings’ contention that, if children are to be happy in schools, their teachers should also be happy, this paper tries to explore a way in which the obviously intimate but seemingly conflicting connections between students’ and teachers’ happiness can be understood from the viewpoint of Stanley Cavell’s reading of J. S. Mill. Mill’s conceptions of desire and pleasure are examined as a means of liberating the above connection from existing prioritization: that is, teachers’ or students’ happiness comes (...) first. The pursuit of happiness for both teachers and students is discussed, in the hopes of illuminating alternative images of teacher education. (shrink)

This essay responds to the contemporary anxiety in theology over the relationship between Christian and non-Christian discourse. My argument proceeds as follows. First, I construe the debate between liberal and postliberal theology as turning on the wrestle between the idiosyncrasy and intelligibility of Christian discourse. While the liberal tradition insists that Christian discourse can be rendered intelligible to non-Christian forms of thought and life, and so can contribute to the flourishing of a shared social life, postliberal critics worry that this (...) insistence leads to the capitulation of that discourse to foreign, hostile criteria, and so to the loss of the idiosyncratic Christian identity. Second, I .. (shrink)

This essay explores possible paths after postcolonial theory, with the after understood not as a negation, but as a form of inheritance and the creation of routes, such that an aftermath need not have a resentful or self-hating relation and nor simply an acceptance of given pictures of ‘western’ thought. The route explored here is neither fully secular nor religious, and nor from a radically alternative ontology, but rather prompted by three enduring concerns within the global humanities, explored in three (...) sections of this paper. The first section ‘Political Theologies as an Alternative to the Dichotomy of Religion and Secularism’, asks what the difference and proximity between theology and theory may be, if we acknowledge the at times less visible theological genealogies of ‘secular’ social and critical theory. Rather than taking such genealogies only to be an effect of Eurocentrism, or as the lasting hegemony of Protestant Christian assumptions, we examine other ways of navigating tentative movements across ontological borders. The second section, ‘Theory as Darsan (Pilgrimage/Path/School)’ suggests that rather than thinking of concepts as anchored entirely to given territories or identities or as tools of ‘generalization’, we might place the word theory in relation to its genealogical kin, theos and theoria/darsan, as the formation of contemplative styles that emerge through forms of recurrent journeying within and across territories, following the tracks of others. As an instance of such journeying, we focus on a particular thinker, Stanley Cavell, whose writing suggests ways of remapping geographies of thought, in ways that could be significant for global thought, across so-called western and non-western territories. How might such journeys be continued? Section 3: ‘A Darsan: the Killing of Birds, Some Centuries Apart’ offers one such journey, three minor coordinates of a world map, located in three poetically enshrined bird killings, in Valmiki’s Ramayana, in Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner, and in Richard Power’s The Echo Maker, each of which incants a curse of unsettlement, and a fault line in relation to being human. This article hopes to contribute to debates on decolonization, currently underway in universities across the world, and seeks to offer a possible alternative to static conceptions of west and non-west. (shrink)

The competition question ‘What Does It Mean To Be An Educated Person?’ is associated with a powerful and influential line of thought in the philosophy of R. S. Peters. It is a question that needs always to be asked again. I respond by asking what it means, now, to be an educated person—that is, how the value of being an educated person is currently understood, and, further, how it might be understood differently. The starting point of this paper then is (...) not exactly the question of how we should best conceive of education, or of the educated person, in terms, for example, of initiation or of moral development. Instead I am concerned with who the supposedly educated person is today, according to the particular discourses and practices to which we are subject. I begin, then, by outlining the notion of the entrepreneurial self from the perspective of governmentality, with particular reference to questions of economy and the way in which the economic imperative is present in current policy. I then reconsider the idea of the educated person with reference to notions of economy and visibility as these relate to ideas of education and the self in Plato's The Republic. Discussion of readings of The Republic and of other texts of Plato by Stanley Cavell and Michel Foucault indicates how prevailing constructions of knowledge, practice, and subjectivity might be resisted. The question of what it means to be an educated person is thereby released from a particular mode of accounting for the self. (shrink)

The paper examines how the current evolution and growth of ICTs enables a greater number of individuals to communicate and interact with each other on a larger scale: this phenomenon enables people to cross the conventional boundaries set up across modernity. The presence of diverse barriers does not however disappear, and we therefore still experience cultural, political, legal and moral boundaries in the globalised Information Society. The paper suggests that the issue of boundaries is to be understood, primarily, in philosophical (...) terms, in order to explain in what sense the fundamental historicity and situatedness of human beings does not necessarily prevent them from being able to cross the boundaries of their own experiences and to communicate with other human beings. Our line of reasoning is based on the idea that the epistemic and moral subject is neither a pure universal subject always transcending the limits of its experience nor the mere product of the context in which it find itself embedded. By virtue of its continued existence and experience of any given context, the epistemic and moral subject is asked to respond to the constraining affordances of data and to account for the moral calls of the other. This intertwinement of responsiveness and accountability towards what is "over there" confers us an original understanding of what is "here". (shrink)

This article connects the theory of Hannah Arendt and the philosophy of Stanley Cavell to the questions of what thinking is and how it appears on film. It focuses on two theatrical trials: Adolph Eichmann’s trial (1961) and the ending sequence in Frank Capra’s Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936) in which the questions of thought and thoughtlessness are at stake. Whereas Arendt considers the ways that thinking poses challenges to representation (there is, she writes, a “scarcity of documentary evidence”), (...) Cavell turns to cinema and the camera’s “knowledge of the metaphysical restlessness” that becomes manifest when the mind thinks and the body fidgets. He goes so far as to argue that cinema may even “prove thinking.” Though they arrive at opposite conclusions, Cavell and Arendt share a critique of modern subjectivity that these trials bring to light: reason has replaced thinking and skepticism of the world has replaced consciousness in it. But film, as read through Cavell, may reveal a crisis of altogether different order. It is not that thinking cannot be represented, as Arendt argues; in the age of cinema, thinking cannot be concealed. If anything, thoughtlessness defies representation. (shrink)

Most commentators working on Wittgenstein’s remarks on ethics note that he rejects the very possibility of traditional normative ethics, that is, a philosophically justified normative guide for right conduct. In this article, Wittgenstein’s view of ethical reflection as presented in his notebooks from 1936 to 1938 is investigated, and the question of whether it involves ethical guidance is addressed. In Wittgenstein’s remarks, we can identify three requirements inherent in ethical reflection. The first two is revealed in the realisation that ethical (...) reflection presupposes both a clear understanding of oneself and a normative ideal of how one ought to live and reason. The third source of normativity springs from the fact that ethical reflection involves a relationship with the other, not as judge, but as example and addressee. In this way, ethical reflection is essentially relational. In the article, we unfold how these three normative sources figure in Wittgenstein’s remarks, especially how the third requirement, the relationship with the other, shows both a point of conversion and a difference between his view of ethics and religious faith. It will also be argued that even if Wittgenstein thus presents ethical reflection as a normatively guided activity, the content of the guidance is personal, springing solely from the reflecting individual. (shrink)

This article argues that Stanley Cavell's notion of moral perfectionism must be understood, within the American cultural context, as deeply intertwined with myths of heroic American masculinity. It traces connections between Cavell's descriptions of moral perfectionism, the transcendentalist authors on whom he relies, and writings about the myth of the American frontier hero. When understood as a tradition of masculinity, it becomes possible to trace moral perfectionism across much wider areas of American cinematic culture than Cavell's reading suggests; Good Will (...) Hunting is used as an example which further illuminates the relationship between moral perfectionism and American masculinities. Psychoanalysis, a major feature of Good Will Hunting as well as an important aspect of Cavellian moral perfectionism, must also be revisited in terms of the differences in its popular mythologisation for men versus for women. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to say something significant about Stanley Cavell's style. To accomplish this task, we adopt a distant reading approach, quantifying what seems to be an idiosyncratic use of parentheses. After outlining our methodological approach and the choices of texts from Cavell's corpus, we will present the results of our quantitative analysis. Two kinds of results will be presented and interpreted: the result of a comparison between Cavell and other authors (i.e. why Cavell's use of parentheses (...) is exceptional) and the result of a quantitative analysis of Cavell's texts (i.e. how Cavell uses parentheses throughout his books). For both results, we will provide our own interpretation. In the conclusion, we will draw the moral of this parenthetical story, hoping to open future parentheses. (shrink)

Introduction to William Rothman by Alan Cholodenko in the Special Section of Film-Philosophy on Stanley Cavell.