Themes out of School

Download or read book Themes out of School written by Stanley Cavell and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2013-06-07 with total page 283 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Themes out of School . . . cannot help but urge us to think, in fresh and undistracted ways, about the world that actually confronts us.” —Jay Parini, Hudson Review In the first essay of this book, Stanley Cavell characterizes philosophy as a “willingness to think not about something other than what ordinary human beings think about, but rather to learn to think undistractedly about things that ordinary human beings cannot help thinking about, or anyway cannot help having occur to them, sometimes in fantasy, sometimes as a flash across a landscape.” Fantasies of film and television and literature, flashes across the landscape of literary theory, philosophical discourse, and French historiography give Cavell his starting points in these twelve essays. Here is philosophy in and out of “school,” understood as a discipline in itself or thought through the works of Shakespeare, Molière, Kierkegaard, Thoreau, Brecht, Makavejev, Bergman, Hitchcock, Astaire, and Keaton.