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| Cities of Words: Pedagogical Letters on a Register of the Moral Life
ISBN: 9780674971264
Platform/Publisher: JSTOR / Harvard University Press
Digital rights: Users: unlimited; Printing: chapter; Download: chapter
Subjects: Perfection -- Moral and ethical aspects; Conduct of life; Ethics;
Drawing equally upon Emerson and classic Hollywood cinema, Cavell (A Pitch of Philosophy), a renowned professor of philosophy at Harvard, explores a theory of "moral perfectionism" in this work taken from a collection of lectures given at Harvard and the University of Chicago. Against the predominantly metaphysical notion of perfection that demands moral questions be provided with absolute answers, Cavell explores the more uncertain intersection of intellectual and emotional elements in everyday moral choices that quotidian social affairs frequently demand from us. He covers the juxtaposition of the individual and the broader community and the crises of conformity that confront moral agents by analyzing remarriage comedy films of the 1930s and 1940s. While in its own right a profound addition to film criticism in its reading of Hollywood favorites such as The Philadelphia Story, Mr. Deeds Goes to Town and Now, Voyager, lay readers will be entertained by Cavell's attention to cinematic detail and pragmatically therapeutic approach to moral questions. A sober examination of an ethics of "self-reliance," Cavell's cinematic criticism is as entertaining as it is enlightening and exemplifies, once again, his uncanny ability to recover the deepest insights of modern life within the language of the ordinary. (May) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Stanley Cavell was born Stanley Louis Goldstein in Atlanta, Georgia on September 1, 1926. He received a degree in music from the University of California, Berkeley and a Ph.D. in philosophy from Harvard University. From 1953 to 1956, he was a junior fellow in Harvard's Society of Fellows. He then taught for six years at the University of California, Berkeley. He returned to Harvard to teach in 1963, becoming professor emeritus in 1997. His first book, Must We Mean What We Say?, was published in 1969. His other books included The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality, and Tragedy; Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage; and Themes Out of School: Effects and Causes. He died from heart failure on June 19, 2018 at the age of 91. (Bowker Author Biography) |
