Cities of Words

Stanley Cavell (1926–2018) was Walter M. Cabot Professor of Aesthetics and the General Theory of Value, Emeritus, at Harvard University. His numerous books include The Claim of Reason, Cities of Words, and Philosophy the Day after Tomorrow.

Perhaps more than any living philosopher in the English language Cavell has consistently and almost obsessively been at pains to carve out his own path. He is genuinely original. But more than this his life-long commitment to this project has been undertaken with a philosophical seriousness that is increasingly unusual. City of Words will, then, not only illuminate previous publications on Hollywood film of the 1930s and 1940s, but also enable careful readers to begin to understand how recurrent themes - the import and impact of skepticism and the necessity that we understand its challenge; the strangeness and richness of attending to the everyday; the interfaces between moral, theological and psychoanalytic thought; the common strands in ordinary language philosophy's articulation of key questions in the philosophy of mind and of language and those same questions in the European philosophical school, most especially in the work of Wittgenstein and Heidegger - link together and stretch across readings of the western philosophical tradition. Cities of Words will, then, help the considerable Cavellian oeuvre begin to make sense in a far more substantial, and perhaps unusual way than it has heretofore. It shows us how Cavell ticks.

• Preface Introduction 1. Emerson 2. The Philadelphia Story 3. Locke 4. Adam's Rib 5. John Stuart Mill 6. Gaslight 7. Kant 8. It Happened One Night 9. Rawls 10. Mr. Deeds Goes to Town 11. Nietzsche 12. Now, Voyager 13. Ibsen 14. Stella Dallas 15. Freud 16. The Lady Eve 17. Plato 18. His Girl Friday 19. Aristotle 20. The Awful Truth 21. Henry James and Max Ophuls 22. G. B. Shaw: Pygmalion and Pygmalion 23. Shakespeare and Rohmer: Two Tales of Winter Themes of Moral Perfectionism Bibliography Acknowledgments Index