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“... Movies magnify, so when pictures began talking they magnified words. Somehow, as in the case of opera’s magnification of words, this made their words mostly ignorable, like the ground, as if the industrialised human species had been looking for a good excuse to get away from its words, or looking for an explanation of the fact that we do get away, even must ...”

“... Keep in mind that I come from that part of the world for which the question of old and new – call it the question of a human future – is, or was, logically speaking, a matter of life and death: if the new world is not new then America does not exist, it is merely one more outpost of old oppressions. Americans like Thoreau (and if Thoreau then Emerson and Walt Whitman, to say no more) seem to have lived so intensely or intently within the thought of a possible, and possibly closed, future that a passage like the following would be bound to have struck them as setting an old mood: ‘Everything is worn out: revolutions, profits, miracles ...”

“... Early​ in his lovely and useful book on D.W. Winnicott, published in 1988, Adam Phillips gives a sketch of certain aims and fates of that increasingly treasured figure of British psychoanalysis which maps certain of his own directions in his recent collection of psychoanalytic essays, Terrors and Experts. Winnicottwould also enjoy playing off a language of common-sense against a language of professional expertise ...”

“... one is honest) are inherently uncertain, often contradictory, and usually tinged with emotion. As Stanley Cavell concedes at the outset of his own set of ‘autobiographical exercises’, the thinker who has chosen to examine himself risks turning ‘philosophically critical discourse into clinical discourse’. ...”

“... say that the ordinary doesn’t exist, or that it exists only when we don’t look at it closely? Stanley Cavell has been thinking about the ordinary (although not only about that) for the whole of his philosophical career, and he knows the riddle inside out. But the riddle is not where his interest lies. He doesn’t mind if the world goes strange on ...”

“... which people know the kinds of actions and events that give rise to pain in others.The philosopher Stanley Cavell (who died in 2018 at the age of 91) was, as it happens, hit by a car when he was small, and as a result had trouble with his hearing in one ear throughout his life. He was also a bit older and of a different philosophical and political ...”

“... to it, except when, somewhere along the way, they changed their minds about Original Spelling. Stanley Cavell calls himself an amateur, which is modest, considering the celebrity of his Shakespeare essays, of which one, the long meditation on King Lear, has been on reading lists for twenty years. However, he is by vocation a philosopher, of ...”

“... that a play never can. It also, as the film it is, refers repeatedly to itself. So, at least, does Cavell see it. He is not one of those critics, therefore, ‘who cannot imagine that the products of the Hollywood studio system could in principle rival the exports of revolutionary Russia.’ On the contrary. Americans, he says, overpraise but undervalue their ...”

“... The writers who have used the form in the questioning spirit – the essayists, from Montaigne to Stanley Cavell, who generate a sense that the act of writing is for them a genuine process of intellectual exploration – are far outnumbered by those for whom the essay is a forum for pyrotechnics and exhibitionism, for politics and for performance. The ...”

“... spoilers than usual. ‘One can feel​ that there is always a camera left out of the picture,’ Stanley Cavell wrote in The World Viewed, ‘the one working now.’ The proliferation of selfies has familiarised us with first-person photography but nothing so far has solved the problem of first-person narration in film. Whatever subjective-looking ...”

“... said that in moving pictures ‘we see life as it is when we have no part in it,’ and the one Stanley Cavell evokes when he speaks of films as presenting a world that is complete without us, a world we seek both to deny and to welcome. We don’t want a world that is complete without us: that is why we place ourselves in the movies, borrow their ...”

“... greatest screwball of them all’. And that it is the greatest of the comedies of remarriage that Stanley Cavell studies in his book Pursuits of Happiness. It’s a little harder to say why. The film is not as fast and zany as Bringing up Baby, and not as wise and worldly as His Girl Friday. Part of the answer to the question is, as Haskell says, the ...”

“... all too beautifully suited to this use, almost unimaginable for any other purpose. This is what Stanley Cavell calls the effect of the uncanny in film: the sense that some locations, not in reality dangerous, can be made to invite danger when they are filmed, so that terrible things seem ‘as natural to the place as the conventional events we might ...”

“... turns out, because he seems to have left the set. An old dream of cinema, from Virginia Woolf to Stanley Cavell. Life gesticulates or vegetates; the camera keeps ...”

“... the cultural power of these problems. To someone anxious to make an adequate response to Rorty, Stanley Cavell’s new and long-awaited book The Claim of Reason, at first promises well. Cavell announces at the outset that part of the importance of Wittgenstein’s writing is that it ‘is not of a character that ...”