Stanley Cavell

Stanley Louis Cavell (/kəˈvɛl/; born September 1, 1926) is an American philosopher. He is the Walter M. Cabot Professor of Aesthetics and the General Theory of Value, Emeritus, at Harvard University.

Cavell was born to a Jewish family in Atlanta, Georgia. His mother, a locally renowned pianist, trained him in music from his earliest days. During the Depression, Cavell’s parents moved several times between Atlanta and Sacramento, California.

As a teenager, Cavell played lead alto saxophone as the youngest and sole white member of a black jazz band in Sacramento. At 16, he entered the University of California, Berkeley, where he majored in music, studying with, among others, Roger Sessions and Ernest Bloch. After graduation, he began studies in composition at the Juilliard School of Music in New York City, only to discover that music was no longer his aspiration. He eventually began to study philosophy at UCLA, and then transferred as a graduate student to Harvard University. As a student there he came under the influence of the visiting J. L. Austin, whose teaching and methods "knocked him off ... [his] horse." In 1954 he was awarded a Junior Fellowship at the Harvard Society of Fellows. Before completing his Ph.D., he became an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1956. From 1962–1963 Cavell was a Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, where he became a lifelong friend of the British philosopher Bernard Williams. In 1963 he returned to the Harvard Philosophy Department, where he became the Walter M. Cabot Professor of Aesthetics and the General Theory of Value.