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STANLEY CAVELL Obituary
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Memories and Condolences
for STANLEY CAVELL
John Hughes
June 25, 2018
Please accept my sincere condolences for the passing of this wonderful man.
Like so many others, reading and re-reading (and re-reading and re-reading) Stanley Cavell's work has been a mainstay in my life for decades, a perpetual joy as well as labour and instruction. I emailed him once about twenty years ago, unable any longer to repress my appreciation of his work, and perhaps stimulated by the vitality of the voice within the writing to want to reply to it. Needless to say perhaps, he wrote back at length. I will be going on vacation next week, and will take his Pursuits of Happiness with me, and will remember him, and reflect on how his work has helped me in so many ways, both in terms of writing, but also in terms of living.
Linda MacDonald
June 23, 2018
Dear Cathleen, Ben & David,
I was sorry to hear of Stanley's passing. He was one of the nicest people I have ever known. Always warm and joyful, any time we met. He will be greatly missed by all. With deepest sympathy. Linda MacDonald
June Cormack
June 22, 2018
Cathleen & Family,
I am so sorry for your loss. May you find peace.
June
June 21, 2018
His writing meant the world to me.
-Ralph Berry
Kenneth Dauber
June 21, 2018
More than anyone I have ever read, Stanley helped me not so much to mean what I say, but to understand what I mean. The memorable period for me was a summer in the early 70s when I came upon "The Claim of Reason." Here was a voice I could not get out of my head, a way of thinking, of approaching thought that appeared to me at once what I knew I knew but couldn't quite see or know what to do with, something like the "alienated majesty" that Stanley found in Emerson, as I was later to find out, a book that seemed to speak to me directly, as if in finding himself out, Stanley had also found me. This sense of thinking as an intimate transaction, as a very mode of intimacy--with ourselves and with others-- is what Stanley's work pointed us all to. And that sense of intimacy, a reflective intimacy, intimacy at a distance that made it all the more intimate because not too quick and not pretending to be too deep--just exactly what he meant by "ordinary language philosophy--has stayed with me ever since. Stanley was a philosopher. But he was a Jewish philosopher and an American philosopher, and a certain culture of both cultures, a theoretical pragmatism, was just everywhere in his work. I met Stanley a few times at Buffalo, when he was invited to speak, and he was the most approachable and appreciative of persons. I once asked him how it was that, after publishing so little for so long, he had become a publishing demon. With a twinkle in his eye and standing on one foot--to intimate Hillel's response when Hillel was asked to describe the Torah's message in one sentence--he said to me, in his best version of demotic Jewish-American
speech, "I used to worry about what they would say. But now, I tell myself, if they don't like it, 'let them do me something.'" Would that I could, now, do something for him. He meant very much to me and to so many others.
David O'Connor
June 20, 2018
Professor Cavell was an exemplary mind, whose intellectual fertility gave many others the provocation to find their own voice. No other contemporary philosopher helped me so much to mean what I say. Thanks, Stanley, and goodbye.
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