Stanley Covell, Walter M. Cabot Professor of Aesthetics and the General Theory of Value, Emeritus, on Tuesday, June 19, 2018. For 51 years, he was the beloved husband of Cathleen (Cohen) Cavell. Survived by his children, Rachel Cavell, Benjamin Cavell, David Cavell and his grandchildren, Alex Batkin, Liza Batkin, Sasha Cavell, Josie Cavell and Sam Masters. Father-in-law of Norton Batkin, Emily Cavell, Kate Drizos Cavell and former husband of Marcia Cavell.
Services at Temple Israel, 477 Longwood Ave., Boston (parking available on the Riverway) on Friday, June 22 at 12:00 noon. Burial in Mt. Auburn Cemetery, 580 Mount Auburn St., Cambridge.
Memorial observance on Sunday from 11am-4pm at his late residence.
In lieu of flowers, remembrances may be made to Southern Poverty Law Center, www.splcenter.org or the Harvard Film Archive.
** Obituary appearing in the Friday, June 22, 2018 edition of the Boston Globe
By Bryan Marquard Globe Staff
Stanley Cavell’s most popular work — at the cash register, at least — was “Pursuits of Happiness,” a spirited discourse about seven old classic films that illuminated what he called “the Hollywood comedy of remarriage.”
His 1981 book proved to be a popular wedding present chosen by those who skipped the bridal registry and gave the happy couple food for thought, rather than another place setting upon which to dine on less intellectually fulfilling fare.
He was probably the only Harvard University philosophy professor who ever made Hegel and Heidegger share the page with Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell. In the book’s introduction, Dr. Cavell said he wanted to “take the opportunity to acknowledge that philosophy, as I understand it, is indeed outrageous, inherently so. It seeks to disquiet the foundations of our lives and to offer us in recompense nothing better than itself.” By way of offering much more, he expanded the realm of philosophical conversations beyond the confines of academia’s traditional dialogues.
“He’s always claimed to be a little of an outsider in philosophy,” said Michael Wood, a professor emeritus of English and comparative literature at Princeton University.
Dr. Cavell was a talented musician before launching an academic career that he concluded as Harvard’s Walter M. Cabot professor of aesthetics and the general theory of value, emeritus. He died of cardiac arrest Tuesday in Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. Dr. Cavell was 91 and had lived in Brookline.
The recipient of a MacArthur Foundation “genius grant” in 1992, Dr. Cavell wrote some of his most influential work on the theories of British philosopher J.L. Austin and the Austrian-British philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein.
In those writings, “what he did as a philosopher was kind of magical,” Wood said. “He somehow made them more relevant to ordinary thinking about your own life than when you’re reading them. He made you actually feel that this is really relevant.”
And Dr. Cavell did so while being “the most exciting classroom presence I’ve ever experienced,” Christopher Benfey, an English professor at Mount Holyoke College, recalled in a tribute posted on the The New York Review of Books website.
Perhaps because he started out as a musician before moving into philosophy, Dr. Cavell could be as ardent about jazz as he was about Austin’s ordinary-language philosophy, though he was passionate about that, too.
“That what we ordinarily say and mean may have a direct and deep control over what we can philosophically say and mean is an idea which many philosophers find oppressive,” he wrote in the title essay for his first book, 1969’s “Must We Mean What We Say?”
Meanwhile, the plays of Shakespeare, the movies of the Marx Brothers, and the romantic screwball comedies from 1934 to 1949 that he featured in “Pursuits” all found a home in his many books, and in his lectures. Introducing a film symposium at Harvard in 1986, Dr. Cavell said the romantic comedies produced in the 1930s were “vastly underrated.” Audiences and academics alike, he added, find it “too hard to believe in the seriousness of the enjoyable.”
Benfey noted that Dr. Cavell “was a jazz musician before he was a philosopher. An air of improvisation and fun hung over everything he did.”
And yet “one of the things that made him special is that he was all of a piece,” said his wife, Cathleen Cavell, an attorney. “Work self and private self were completely consistent. He was never ‘on’ in a way that wasn’t him.”
Dr. Cavell also was not given to airs, despite his academic accomplishments.
“One that comes to mind is how elegant he was. He never opened a door without holding it open for someone else,” said his son David.
And if Dr. Cavell happened to be eating lunch when someone arrived at his home, “he would rip his sandwich in half, offer it to the guest, and pull a chair out,” David added.
“He had a kind of humility and a way of treating everybody with dignity and respect that was remarkable,” Cathleen said.
Dr. Cavell’s birth name was Stanley Louis Goldstein. An only child, he was born in Atlanta and spent many of his early years moving back and forth from Atlanta to Sacramento as his father chased work in the Great Depression.
His mother, the former Fannie Segal, was a talented pianist who nurtured his musical talents. His father, Irving Goldstein, worked in small shops that sold jewelry and other wares.
When young Stanley Goldstein was 14, an Atlanta newspaper published a photo feature showing him playing six instruments.
Two years later, he graduated from C.K. McClatchy High School in Sacramento. Within a few months he had changed his last name to Cavell, an anglicized version of his father’s Polish name, which on various documents had been spelled Kavelieruskii or Kavelieriskii. An Ellis Island immigration officer had conferred the name Goldstein on Dr. Cavell’s father.
Dr. Cavell tried to enlist in the military after high school but was rejected because of the hearing loss he suffered when he was struck by a car as a 6-year-old. By then he was already a professional musician, a saxophonist and the only white member of a jazz ensemble. Earning tuition by playing gigs, he went to the University of California Berkeley, graduating with a bachelor’s degree in music.
He then studied composition at The Juilliard School in New York but found his interests lay elsewhere — with the many movies he saw while skipping classes, and eventually with philosophy.
Dr. Cavell initially was a philosophy graduate student at the University of California Los Angeles and finished his doctorate at Harvard, where he was a junior fellow in the Society of Fellows. He taught for six years at UC Berkeley before returning to Harvard, from which he retired in 1997.
In 1955, Dr. Cavell married Marcia Schmid. They had one daughter, Rachel, who now lives in Rhinebeck, N.Y. His marriage to Marcia Cavell, a philosopher and psychoanalyst, ended in divorce.
Dr. Cavell married Cathleen Cohen in 1967. They have two sons, Benjamin of Santa Monica, Calif., and David of Cambridge.
In addition to his wife and sons, Dr. Cavell leaves five grandchildren.
A memorial service will be held in Temple Israel in Boston at noon on Friday, his 51st wedding anniversary.
“I do not remember when I began thinking of myself in my writing as better at endings than at beginnings but in conducting my life as better at beginnings than endings,” Dr. Cavell wrote in his 2010 memoir “Little Did I Know: Excerpts from Memory.”
It was the last of his books, many of which were popular, though few would match the notoriety of 1979’s “The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality, and Tragedy.” That book evolved from his doctoral dissertation and “was stolen so many times from the New York Public Library that they finally wrote him a letter and said, ‘We’re not replacing it,’ ” his wife said.
Other fans of his work preferred to simply steal a few moments of his time.
“If you started to know him through his writing and got to know him as a teacher, it was very rewarding and never jarring,” Cathleen added. “He was never not true to himself, and I think that’s rare.”
Bryan Marquard can be reached at [email protected].
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