Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Contributors
- Stanley Cavell
- 1 Introduction: Between Acknowledgment and Avoidance
- 2 Stanley Cavell and Ethics
- 3 The Names of Action
- 4 Stanley Cavell's Vision of the Normativity of Language: Grammar, Criteria, and Rules
- 5 Aesthetics, Modernism, Literature: Cavell's Transformations of Philosophy
- 6 A Second Primavera: Cavell, German Philosophy, and Romanticism
- 7 Cavell on American Philosophy and the Idea of America
- 8 “Disowning Knowledge”: Cavell on Shakespeare
- 9 Cavell on Film, Television, and Opera
- Brief Annotated Bibliography of Works by and about Stanley Cavell
- Index
5 - Aesthetics, Modernism, Literature: Cavell's Transformations of Philosophy
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 08 January 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Contributors
- Stanley Cavell
- 1 Introduction: Between Acknowledgment and Avoidance
- 2 Stanley Cavell and Ethics
- 3 The Names of Action
- 4 Stanley Cavell's Vision of the Normativity of Language: Grammar, Criteria, and Rules
- 5 Aesthetics, Modernism, Literature: Cavell's Transformations of Philosophy
- 6 A Second Primavera: Cavell, German Philosophy, and Romanticism
- 7 Cavell on American Philosophy and the Idea of America
- 8 “Disowning Knowledge”: Cavell on Shakespeare
- 9 Cavell on Film, Television, and Opera
- Brief Annotated Bibliography of Works by and about Stanley Cavell
- Index
Summary
From the outset Cavell has proclaimed an intimacy, at times amounting to a virtual identity, between the logic of aesthetic claiming (the logic appropriate to our claims, evaluative and interpretive, about works of art and, by extension, the logic of those works, their claiming) and the logic peculiar to ordinary language philosophy (“what we say when” and “what we mean when we say it”). Cavell also states that artistic modernism “only makes explicit and bare what has always been true of art” (MD, 189), entailing that now what we think of aesthetics, and so of art, is bound to artistic modernism. Holding onto the first identification of aesthetic claiming and philosophy, this would associate or identify the logical form of modern philosophy – its forms of writing, argument, claiming – as forged paradigmatically in Wittgenstein's late writings, with the logical form of modernist works of art, with their modes of claiming and authenticity. Analogously, at the close of The Claim of Reason Cavell is mourning Othello and Desdemona, finding in their fate something that philosophy must be capable of – call it acknowledgment – but that, ever since Plato banned the poets from his ideal republic, philosophy has banned from its precincts.
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- Stanley Cavell , pp. 107 - 142Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2003
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