Philosophers in Depth Stanley Cavell on Aesthetic Understanding Edited by Garry L. Hagberg Philosophers in Depth Series Editor Constantine Sandis Department of Philosophy University of Hertfordshire Hatfield, UK Philosophers in Depth is a series of themed edited collections focusing on particular aspects of the thought of major figures from the history of phi- losophy. The volumes showcase a combination of newly commissioned and previously published work with the aim of deepening our understand- ing of the topics covered. Each book stands alone, but taken together the series will amount to a vast collection of critical essays covering the history of philosophy, exploring issues that are central to the ideas of individual philosophers. This project was launched with the financial support of the Institute for Historical and Cultural Research at Oxford Brookes University, for which we are very grateful. More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14552 Garry L. Hagberg Editor Stanley Cavell on Aesthetic Understanding Editor Garry L. Hagberg Bard College Annandale-on-Hudson NY, USA Philosophers in Depth ISBN 978-3-319-97465-1 ISBN 978-3-319-97466-8 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-97466-8 Library of Congress Control Number: 2018952592 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. 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Cover illustration: © loonger/ Getty Images This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland C ontents Part I Understanding Persons Through Film 1 1 I Want to Know More About You: On Knowing and Acknowledging in Chinatown 3 Francey Russell 2 Other Minds and Unknown Women: The Case of Gaslight 37 Jay R. Elliott 3 The Melodrama of the Unknown Man 57 Peter Dula Part II Shakespeare, Opera, and Philosophical Interpretation 73 4 Cordelia’s Moral Incapacity in King Lear 75 David A. Holiday 5 Disowning Certainty: Tragic and Comic Skepticism in Cavell, Montaigne, and Shakespeare 109 V. Stanley Benfell v vi CONTENTS 6 Must We Mean What We Sing?—Così Fan Tutte and the Lease of Voice 133 Ian Ground Part III Aesthetic Understanding and Moral Life 165 7 What Matters: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Importance 167 Sandra Laugier 8 Achilles’ Tears: Cavell, the Iliad, and Possibilities for the Human 197 David LaRocca 9 Wittgenstein “in the Midst of” Life, Death, Sanity, Madness—and Mathematics 239 Richard McDonough Part IV Reading Fiction and Literary Understanding 263 10 Fraudulence, Knowledge, and Post-Imperial Geographies in John Le Carré’s Fiction: A Cavellian Postcolonial Reading 265 Alan Johnson 11 Must We Do What We Say? The Plight of Marriage and Conversation in George Meredith’s The Egoist 293 Erin Greer 12 Within the Words of Henry James: Cavell as Austinian Reader 321 Garry L. Hagberg Index 357 n C otes on ontributors V. Stanley Benfell is a Humanities Professor of Comparative Literature at Brigham Young University, where he is the Head of the Comparative Literature Program. He is the author of The Biblical Dante (2011) as well as articles and book chapters on medieval and early modern literature and its relationship to religious and philosophical texts and ideas. He is cur- rently at work on a study of philosophical skepticism and early modern comedy. Peter  Dula is Professor of Religion and Culture and Chair of the Department of Bible and Religion at Eastern Mennonite University in Harrisonburg, Virginia. He is the author of Cavell, Companionship, and Christian Theology (2011). Jay R. Elliott is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Bard College. He is the author of Character (2017) and co-editor of the Norton Anthology of Western Philosophy: After Kant: The Analytic Tradition. Erin Greer is an Assistant Professor of Literature at the University of Texas at Dallas. Her current book project stages a dialogue between liter- ary and philosophical texts in order to develop a theory of “conversation” as a medium central to intimate and political life. Her fields of research and teaching include late Victorian through contemporary British and Anglophone literature, new media, ordinary language philosophy, politi- cal philosophy, and gender and sexuality studies. vii viii NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS Ian Ground has, over the last 30 years, taught philosophy at a number of institutions including Newcastle, Durham, the Open University, Edinburgh, and Sunderland University. He has published in the philoso- phy of mind, especially our understanding of animal minds, in the philoso- phy of art, and on the thought and life of the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein and is a regular reviewer for The Times Literary Supplement. His books include Art or Bunk?, Can We Understand Animal Minds?, and Portraits of Wittgenstein, a comprehensive collection of memoirs. He is currently a Visiting Research Fellow in Philosophy at the University of Hertfordshire, a Visiting Lecturer at Newcastle University, and Vice- President of the British Wittgenstein Society. Garry L. Hagberg is the James H. Ottaway Professor of Philosophy and Aesthetics at Bard College and has also been Professor of Philosophy at the University of East Anglia. Author of numerous papers at the intersec- tion of aesthetics and the philosophy of language, his books include Meaning and Interpretation: Wittgenstein, Henry James, and Literary Knowledge; Art as Language: Wittgenstein, Meaning, and Aesthetic Theory; and Describing Ourselves: Wittgenstein and Autobiographical Consciousness. He is an editor of Art and Ethical Criticism and of Fictional Characters, Real Problems: The Search for Ethical Content in Literature, co-editor of A Companion to the Philosophy of Literature, and editor of the journal Philosophy and Literature. He is presently writing a new book on the con- tribution literary experience makes to the formation of self and sensibility, Living in Words: Literature, Autobiographical Language, and the Composition of Selfhood, as well as a series of articles on the exploration of self-constitution in film and a monograph on aesthetic issues in jazz improvisation. David A. Holiday received his B.A. in Philosophy and Psychology from Balliol College, Oxford, an M.Sc. in Philosophy from Edinburgh University, and a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago. He is currently serving as a Postdoctoral Ethics Fellow in the Jackson Center for Ethics and Values at Coastal Carolina University, South Carolina. He teaches and conducts research in normative ethics and moral philosophy, concentrat- ing on moral psychology, action theory, and the history of ethics, and the philosophy of human rights, where he focuses on the foundational norma- tive concepts that help orient, shape, and direct contemporary discourse and practice in global justice. NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS ix Alan Johnson is a Professor of English at Idaho State University, where he specializes in postcolonial literature, with a focus on India, where he was raised. He did a Fulbright there in 2010, and again in 2016–17. He has published on a range of topics, and his 2011 book Out of Bounds focuses on the role that ideas of colonial Indian spaces played in the litera- ture of British India. He is currently working on forest imagery in Indian literature. His chapter here grew out of an introductory class on spy fiction he taught as part of a series on the genre sponsored by ISU’s College of Arts and Letters, and instigated by his colleagues Jennifer Attebery, Pamela Park, and Dan Hunt. David LaRocca is the author of On Emerson and Emerson’s English Traits and the Natural History of Metaphor, co-editor of A Power to Translate the World, and editor of The Bloomsbury Anthology of Transcendental Thought: From Antiquity to the Anthropocene, Stanley Cavell’s Emerson’s Transcendental Etudes, Estimating Emerson: An Anthology of Criticism from Carlyle to Cavell, The Philosophy of Charlie Kaufman, The Philosophy of War Films, and, most recently, The Philosophy of Documentary Film: Image, Sound, Fiction, Truth. He has served as Visiting Assistant Professor in the Cinema Department at Binghamton University, Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the State University of New York College at Cortland, Visiting Scholar in the Department of English at Cornell University, and Lecturer in Screen Studies in the Department of Cinema, Photography, and Media Arts at the Roy H. Park School of Communications at Ithaca College. Educated at Buffalo, Berkeley, Vanderbilt, and at Harvard, where he was also Sinclair Kennedy Traveling Fellow in the United Kingdom, his articles have appeared in Afterimage; Epoché; Liminalities; Post Script; Religions; Transactions; Film and Philosophy; The Senses and Society; The Midwest Quarterly; Journalism, Media and Cultural Studies; The Journal of Religion and Business Ethics; The Journal of Aesthetic Education; and The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism. More details at www.davidlarocca.org. Sandra Laugier is a French philosopher working on moral philosophy, philosophy of language, philosophy of action, and gender studies. She is currently a professor at the University of Paris I Pantheon-Sorbonne, member of Institut Universitaire de France, and Deputy Director of the Sorbonne Institute for Legal and Philosophical Sciences (ISJPS), after being a professor at the University of Picardie Jules Verne in Amiens, France (until 2010). She has worked extensively on J.L. Austin and