The Palgrave Companion to Stanley Cavell's Aesthetic Thought

The Palgrave Companion to Stanley Cavell’s Aesthetic Thought is a collection dedicated to the intersections between Stanley Cavell’s aesthetic thought and an array of major philosophical figures: Kant, Nietzsche, Schelling, Wittgenstein, Austin, Heidegger, Benjamin, Arendt, Derrida, Diamond, Bugbee, and others. It offers a comprehensive account of Cavell’s aesthetic legacy by exploring its indebtedness and relevance to these philosophical interlocutors. The volume’s premise is that Cavell’s conversational mode of philosophizing is intimately connected to his original understanding of art and film and to their centrality in his work. The featured essays elucidate different aspects of this connection, as each chapter reconstructs Cavell’s dialogue with another thinker on a subject chosen from the vast gamut of Cavell’s work: aesthetic experience, philosophical style, perfectionism, reading, literary form, modernism, film genres, and more. The Palgrave Companion to Stanley Cavell’s Aesthetic Thought offers cutting-edge perspectives on traditional Cavellian themes while also opening unexpected avenues of “doing things with Cavell.” It addresses scholars and students interested in Cavell, aesthetics and the arts, dialogical thinking, and their significance for modern philosophy at large.