Thoreau’s Walden is a text that has been misinterpreted in various ways, one consequence of which is a failure to appreciate its significance as a perfectionist and visionary text for education. This paper explores aspects of what might be called its teaching, especially via the kind of teaching that is offered by Stanley Cavell’s commentary, The Senses of Walden. Walden is considered especially in the light of its conception of language as the “father-tongue” and of the ideas of continual rebirth (...) and departure that are associated with this. References to teaching and learning abound in the book, but it is Thoreau’s specific reference to the need for “uncommon schools” that provides a focus for the present discussion. (shrink)

In some recent discussions the implications of postmodernism for education have been wrongly conceived. An alternative approach is offered and this is used as a means for challenging any grand design in the provision of schooling and in the conception of education. Through this, ideas of the whole person implicit in much educational theory and practice (including personal and social education) are questioned. With some reference to the work of Stanley Cavell an attempt is made to show the sort of (...) thinking which might inform education, avoiding both the relativistic and complacent excesses of postmodernism and the explicit systematic planning of the grand design. (shrink)

In the name of efficiency, the practice of education has come to be dominated by neoliberal ideology and procedures of standardization and quantification. Such attempts to make all aspects of practice transparent and subject to systematic accounting lack sensitivity to the invisible and the silent, to something in the human condition that cannot readily be expressed in an either-or form. Seeking alternatives to such trends, Saito reads Dewey’s idea of progressive education through the lens of Emersonian moral perfectionism (to borrow (...) a term coined by Stanley Cavell). She elucidates a spiritual and aesthetic dimension to Dewey’s notion of growth, one considerably richer than what Dewey alone presents in his typically scientific terminology. (shrink)

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.

Writing in continuous gratitude to Gary Matthews's wonderful project of rescuing childhood from its disregard, not to say banishment, in professional philosophy, I relate here certain moments in his considerations of early childhood to moments in Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations, which opens with a scene of childhood from Augustine's Confessions, and also to moments in later stages of childhood (as Matthews also significantly indicates) and, beyond that, to adolescent crises and to what I have called philosophy as "the education of grown-ups." (...) I raise the issue of whether we are to see the "odd" questions of early childhood as proto-science, which will eventually graduate into better science, or as proto-philosophy, which will be continuously elaborated in philosophical investigation. This raises the question of whether philosophy is to be regarded, early or late, as inseparable from science or, as the later Wittgenstein urges, autonomous with respect to science's glamorous advances. (shrink)

In this paper, I explore different ways of picturing language learning in philosophy, all of them inspired by Wittgenstein and all of them concerned about scepticism of meaning. I start by outlining the two pictures of children and language learning that emerge from Kripke's famous reading of Wittgenstein. Next, I explore how social-pragmatic readings, represented by Meredith Williams, attempt to answer the sceptical anxieties. Finally, drawing somewhat on Stanley Cavell, I try to resolve these issues by investigating what characteristically happens (...) to our view of language learning when we do philosophy. The focus throughout is on the relation between the individual (the learning child) and the community (usually represented by the parents), and how that relation is deformed when we operate with a certain philosophical notion of ground. (shrink)

Examines the cultural and human value of literature, offering a new interpretation of Emersonian authors, from William James to Wallace Stevens.

This book points to a line of linguistic scepticism that runs from Emerson, through the pragmatism of William James, and into the 20th century, with Robert Frost and Gertrude Stein. The author explores what James calls the vague and offers a redefinition of individualism.

These lectures by one of the most influential and original philosophers of the twentieth century constitute a sustained argument for the philosophical basis of romanticism, particularly in its American rendering. Through his examination of such authors as Emerson, Thoreau, Poe, Wordsworth, and Coleridge, Stanley Cavell shows that romanticism and American transcendentalism represent a serious philosophical response to the challenge of skepticism that underlies the writings of Wittgenstein and Austin on ordinary language.