A Pitch of Philosophy: autobiographical exercises

Stanley CAVELL · Stanley Cavell

Jun 2009 · Harvard University Press

About this ebook

Annotation What is the pitch of philosophy? Something thrown, for us to catch? A lurch, meant to unsettle us? The relative position of a tone on a scale? A speech designed to persuade? This book is an invitation to the life of philosophy in the United States, as Emerson once lived it and as Stanley Cavell now lives it - in all its topographical ambiguity. Cavell talks about his vocation in connection with what he calls voice - the tone of philosophy - and his right to take that tone, and to describe an anecdotal journey toward the discovery of his own voice. Cavell asks how the voice of philosophy can be heard amid the commerce of everyday life. His autobiographical exercises begin at home with his parents, his father an accidental pawnbroker and accomplished raconteur, his mother a trained and talented musician. In the course of showing us his certain steps in the discovery of his trade, he conveys the sense of what it means to learn to walk on one's own, with a Thoreauvian deliberateness. He pays suitableattention to a serious ally and antagonist to the task of philosophy as he understands it, namely, Jacques Derrida - yet Derrida has mounted a full-scale attack on "voice" and other concepts that Cavell has held open for much of a lifetime. The chapters are interwoven with intense family reminiscences in Cavell's discovery of J.L. Austin, his understanding of Wittgenstein, his raising of Emerson to the philosophical canon, his fascination with film (images of women in a medium for women), the revelation that film and opera are the media of otherness for women. And the voice at the end: hearing in himself the voice of his mother, which is music. Complex, sentimental, witty, A Pitch ofPhilosophy is for anyone who cares to take on philosophy, under whatever name it goes

About the author

Stanley Cavell was born Stanley Louis Goldstein in Atlanta, Georgia on September 1, 1926. He received a degree in music from the University of California, Berkeley and a Ph.D. in philosophy from Harvard University. From 1953 to 1956, he was a junior fellow in Harvard's Society of Fellows. He then taught for six years at the University of California, Berkeley. He returned to Harvard to teach in 1963, becoming professor emeritus in 1997. His first book, Must We Mean What We Say?, was published in 1969. His other books included The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality, and Tragedy; Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage; and Themes Out of School: Effects and Causes. He died from heart failure on June 19, 2018 at the age of 91.