Must We Mean What We Say?: A Book of Essays

by Stanley Cavell

Overview

Reissued with an additional preface to sit alongside the volume on Stanley Cavell in Contemporary Philosophy in Focus this famous collection of essays covers a remarkably wide range of philosophical issues (there are essays on Wittgenstein, Austin, Kierkegaard, and the philosophy of language) and extends beyond philosophy into discussions of music and drama.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781107264045
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press
Publication date:	11/04/2002
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	601 KB

About the Author

Stanley Cavell is the Walter M. Cabot Professor of Aesthetics and the Theory of Value, Emeritus, at Harvard University. He has published widely on a range of subjects from the analytic philosophical tradition to Shakespeare.

Table of Contents

1. Must we mean what we say?; 2. The availability of Wittgenstein's later philosophy; 3. Aesthetic problems of modern philosophy; 4. Austin at criticism; 5. Ending the waiting game: A reading of Beckett's Endgame; 6. Kierkegaard's On Authority and Revelation; 7. Music discomposed; 8. A matter of meaning it; 9. Knowing and acknowledging; 10. The avoidance of love: A reading of King Lear.

Editorial Reviews

"This book changed philosophy. When it was originally published it was both exhilirating and astonishing - for its daring disregard of disciplinary boundaries....No reader of Cavell should be surprised to observe that, now as then, new forms of reductionism, scientism, and sheer flight prove appealing to those for whom a complex human understanding is more than their hearts can bear." Martha Nussbaum, author of Upheavals of Thought

"This book is still the best introduction to the wide-ranging thoughts and the powerful imagination of one of America's most distinguished men of letters. In it, Cavell weaves together Wittgenstein's reactions fo philosophical skepticism with Shakespeare's descriptions of human needs, and J.L. Austin's appeals to 'the ordinary' with reflections on how art lets us see familiar objects anew. No one since William James has been so successful at re-humanizing philosophy - at rescuing that academic discipline from hyperprofessional self-absorption." Richard Rorty, author of Contingency, Irony and Solidarity

"This book is still the best introduction to the wide-ranging thoughts and the powerful imagination of one of America's most distinguished men of letters. In it, Cavell weaves together Wittgenstein's reactions fo philosophical skepticism with Shakespeare's descriptions of human needs, and J.L. Austin's appeals to 'the ordinary' with reflections on how art lets us see familiar objects anew. No one since William James has been so successful at re-humanizing philosophy - at rescuing that academic discipline from hyperprofessional self-absorption." Richard Rorty, author of Contingency, Irony and Solidarity

From the Publisher