Customer Reviews

The Cavell Reader (Blackwell Readers)

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You can skip this book and just read "Pursuits of Happiness" and "The Claim of Reason," two masterpieces by this author. But if you want a little more Cavell after "POH" but need to get your feet wet before plunging into the long, long-winded, and fiendishly difficult "COR," this book is well worth purchasing. You will be treated to Cavell's pet obsessions (e.g. all of modern man's problems can be traced to our all-too-human need to transcend the human condition, so that what we really need from philosophy is to learn how to reconcile ourselves to "the ordinary"), his insane but compelling readings of Shakespeare (up there with Freud's case histories in their interpretive gusto and zaniness), and the quirky, surrealist sense of humour, borrowed from his great influence, Wittgenstein, with which he attacks epistemological problems. As a bonus, you will get a wildly eccentric list (in "Moral Perfectionism") of great philosophical and literary works in which Cavell is quite sure his own obsessions are anticipated, which, if you're like me, you will devote years to working your way through. Cavell is eloquent, nuts, passionate, irritating, moving, and never boring (even when he's droning on and on). One of my favourite authors.

Stanley Cavell is a Professor of Philosophy at Harvard University and the author of two wonderful books (PURSUITS OF HAPPINESS and THE SENSES OF WALDEN). He is also the author of, at least, one unreadable book: THE CLAIM OF REASON. All three are adequately represented in this collection. In addition, the editor includes a fine essay on Kierkegaard. Sadly, one of Cavell's most famous pieces, the early essay on EXISTENTIALISM AND ANALYTICAL PHILOSOPHY was excluded. Overall, there's some of Cavell at his best, and at his worst, in these pages (at times his prose can get pretty ugly).