Cavell Stanley Louis (b.1926), American philosopher whose work has explored skepticism and its consequences. He was Walter M. Cabot Professor of Aesthetics and General Value Theory at Harvard from 1963 until 1997. Central to Cavell’s thought is the view that skepticism is not a theoretical position to be refuted by philosophical theory or dismissed as a mere misuse of ordinary language; it is a reflection of the fundamental limits of human knowledge of the self, of others, and of the external world, limits that must be accepted – in his term ‘acknowledged’ – because the refusal to do so results in illusion and risks tragedy.
Cavell’s work defends J. L. Austin from both positivism and deconstructionism (Must We Mean What We Say?, 1969, and The Pitch of Philosophy, 1994), but not because Cavell is an ‘ordinary language’ philosopher. Rather, his defense of Austin has combined with his response to skepticism to make him a philosopher of the ordinary: he explores the conditions of the possibility and limits of ordinary language, ordinary knowledge, ordinary action, and ordinary human relationships. He uses both the resources of ordinary language and the discourse of philosophers, such as Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Thoreau, and Emerson, and of the arts. Cavell has explored the ineliminability of skepticism in Must We Mean What We Say?, notably in its essay on King Lear, and has developed his analysis in his 1979 magnum opus, The Claim of Reason. He has examined the benefits of acknowledging the limits of human self-understanding, and the costs of refusing to do so, in a broad range of contexts from film (The World Viewed, 1971; Pursuits of Happiness, 1981; and Contesting Tears, 1996) to American philosophy (The Senses of Walden, 1972; and the chapters on Emerson in This New Yet Unapproachable America, 1989, and Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome, 1990). A central argument in The Claim of Reason develops Cavell’s approach by looking at Wittgenstein’s notion of criteria. Criteria are not rules for the use of our words that can guarantee the correctness of the claims we make by them; rather, criteria bring out what we claim by using the words we do. More generally, in making claims to knowledge, undertaking actions, and forming interpersonal relationships, we always risk failure, but it is also precisely in that room for risk that we find the possibility of freedom. This argument is indebted not only to Wittgenstein but also to Kant, especially in the Critique of Judgment. Cavell has used his view as a key to understanding classics of the theater and film. Regarding such tragic figures as Lear, he argues that their tragedies result from their refusal to accept the limits of human knowledge and human love, and their insistence on an illusory absolute and pure love. The World Viewed argues for a realistic approach to film, meaning that we should acknowledge that our cognitive and emotional responses to films are responses to the realities of the human condition portrayed in them. This ‘ontology of film’ prepared the way for Cavell’s treatment of the genre of comedies of remarriage in Pursuits of Happiness. It also grounds his treatment of melodrama in Contesting Tears, which argues that human beings must remain tragically unknown to each other if the limits to our knowledge of each other are not acknowledged. In The Claim of Reason and later works Cavell has also contributed to moral philosophy by his defense – against Rawls’s critique of ‘moral perfectionism’ – of ‘Emersonian perfectionism’: the view that no general principles of conduct, no matter how well established, can ever be employed in practice without the ongoing but never completed perfection of knowledge of oneself and of the others on and with whom one acts. Cavell’s Emersonian perfectionism is thus another application of his Wittgensteinian and Kantian recognition that rules must always be supplemented by the capacity for judgment. See also AUSTIN, J. L.; EMERSON ; KANT; ORDINARY LANGUAGE PHILOSOPHY; WITT- GENSTEI. P.Gu.