Onward with Stanley Cavell

Few philosophers have made the occasion of writing so much a part of its meaning as Stanley Cavell. Taking Here and There as its point of departure, this superb collection brings together some of his finest readers to show how the late, occasional writings—on music, psychoanalysis, language and America—reorient our understanding of his entire body of work. It is essential reading for anyone who believes, as I do, that Cavell’s philosophy belongs to the future.

Professor Espen Hammer, Temple University

When all is said and done, Stanley Cavell will go down as one of the most important philosophers of the last century writing in any language. The sheer range of topics covered with the intensity and sensitivity with which he covered them, all while also advancing an overarching view of the problem of skepticism across so many domains is reflected also in this remarkable collection around the first volume of his Nachlass. The essays here—lucid, probing, timely, inventive, wide-ranging, and by brilliant scholars in their own right—are a boon to Cavell scholarship, revealing how generative his thought remains (and no doubt, will remain).

Martin Shuster, Professor of Philosophy and Isaac Swift Distinguished Professor of Jewish Studies, University of North Carolina at Charlotte

Introduction: Further Considerations of Stanley Cavell’s Posthumous Reception Sandra Laugier, Mathias Girel and David LaRocca
DOI: 10.47788/BSOC1143

I. Futures of Philosophy
1. Like a Hand: Receptive Thinking and the Heart of Futurity in Stanley Cavell Thomas Carlson
DOI: 10.47788/UBQL9081
2. Skepticism for the Future: Reinterpreting Skepticism in the Light of the “Exhaustion of Possibilities” Élise Domenach
DOI: 10.47788/XDNU3420
3. The Outsider Within: Cavell, Derrida, and Deconstruction Stephen Mulhall
DOI: 10.47788/CFKD8530
4. Meaning It: Music, Cavell, and the Sense of Occasion Paul Standish
DOI: 10.47788/ZLNV1858

II. The Ordinary Life of Language
5. Tracing Lines of Thought in “The World as Things: Collecting Thoughts on Collecting” Veena Das
DOI: 10.47788/PJYF5762
6. Language and the Body Martine de Gaudemar
DOI: 10.47788/VMNO5163
7. The Idea of a Here and a There as Sites of Philosophy Jean-Philippe Narboux
DOI: 10.47788/CPPS8604

III. A Mood for Psychoanalysis
8. Becoming Passive: Notes Mostly about “Notes Mostly about Empathy” Jeroen Gerrits
DOI: 10.47788/QWOX1346
9. Cavell’s Ellipsis Claire Brunet
DOI: 10.47788/XXOY9298
10. Expressions of Interest in Phillips and Cavell Emma Williams
DOI: 10.47788/XFCH6034

IV. Thinking American Thought
11. “Undiscussable Differences”?: Stanley Cavell on Allan Bloom and Disappointment David LaRocca
DOI: 10.47788/KXKP3034
12. Reflections on Wallace Stevens at Mount Holyoke Hugo Clémot
DOI: 10.47788/CSTP3254
13. America as Experience: Pragmatism and Perfectionism Mathias Girel and Sandra Laugier
DOI: 10.47788/ECOB3999
14. What is American Philosophy? Russell Goodman
DOI: 10.47788/NVPB9837

Mathias Girel is Lecturer in Philosophy at the École Normale Supérieure (Paris). He also coordinates the Centre Cavaillès team, which is part of the Republic of Knowledge unit at ENS. His research in the philosophy and history of science focuses on the instrumentalization of doubt and the production of ignorance. He published the French edition of Robert Proctor’s Golden Holocaust (2014), co-translated Stanley Cavell’s Cities of Words into French, and is the author of Science et territoires de l’ignorance (Quae, 2017) and L’esprit en acte (Vrin, 2021).

David LaRocca, who studied philosophy, film, rhetoric, and religion at Buffalo, Berkeley, Vanderbilt, and Harvard, is the author or contributing editor of twenty books, including Stanley Cavell’s Emerson’s Transcendental Etudes, Movies with Stanley Cavell in Mind, Television with Stanley Cavell in Mind (with Sandra Laugier), Music with Stanley Cavell in Mind, The Thought of Stanley Cavell and Cinema, Inheriting Stanley Cavell, and Acknowledging Stanley Cavell (Conversations journal no. 7). Author of Emerson’s English Traits and the Natural History of Metaphor, he served as Harvard University’s Sinclair Kennedy Fellow in the United Kingdom and was honored with the Distinguished Achievement Award from the Ralph Waldo Emerson Society. A participant in Werner Herzog’s Rogue Film School, he is the author most recently of Werner Herzog / Rogue Filmmaker. www.DavidLaRocca.org

Sandra Laugier, a former student at the École Normale Supérieure (Paris) and Harvard University, is Professor of Philosophy at Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne. She has also held a number of visiting professorships, including at Boston University, Johns Hopkins University, the Max Planck Institute, Berlin, La Sapienza Roma and the School of Criticism and Theory, Cornell. She has published extensively on ordinary language philosophy (Wittgenstein, Austin, Cavell), moral and political philosophy, the ethics of care, popular film, and TV series, and is the author of over thirty books, including Why We Need Ordinary Language Philosophy (2013), Politics of the Ordinary: Care, Ethics, and Forms of Life (2020), TV-Philosophy (2023), Wittgenstein: The Senses of Use (2025). She is the main translator of Stanley Cavell’s work into French and a Member of the American Philosophical Society.