Becoming Who We Are by Andrew Norris Reviews

Condign Who We Are

Politics and Practical Philosophy in the Work of Stanley Cavell

Andrew Norris

Description

While much literature exists on the piece of work of Stanley Cavell, this is the offset monograph on his contribution to politics and practical philosophy. As Andrew Norris demonstrates, though skepticism is Cavell'due south central topic, Cavell understands it non as an epistemological trouble or position, but as an existential ane. The central question is non what nosotros know or fail to know, but to what extent we take fabricated our lives our own, or failed to exercise and so. Accordingly, Cavell's reception of Austin and Wittgenstein highlights, as other readings of these figures do non, the uncanny nature of the ordinary, the extent to which we commonly fail to mean what we say and exist who we are. Becoming Who We Are charts Cavell'south debts to Heidegger and Thompson Clarke, even as it allows for a deeper appreciation of the extent to which Cavell's Emersonian Perfectionism is a rewriting of Rousseau's and Kant'southward theories of autonomy. This in turn opens upwards a way of understanding citizenship and political discourse that develops points fabricated more than elliptically in the work of Hannah Arendt, and that contrasts in important ways with the positions of liberal thinkers similar John Rawls and Jürgen Habermas on the one hand, and radical democrats like Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe on the other.

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Becoming Who We Are

Politics and Practical Philosophy in the Work of Stanley Cavell

Andrew Norris

Author Information

Andrew Norris teaches political philosophy at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is the editor of Truth and Republic (University of Pennsylvania, 2012), The Merits to Community: Essays on Stanley Cavell and Political Philosophy (Stanford, 2006), and Politics, Metaphysics, and Death: Essays on Giorgio Agamben's Human being Sacer (Duke, 2005), and the writer of over xxx peer-reviewed articles on authors such as Wittgenstein, Hegel, Hannah Arendt, and Michael Oakeshott.

Becoming Who We Are

Politics and Applied Philosophy in the Piece of work of Stanley Cavell

Andrew Norris

Reviews and Awards

"This book provides an introduction not only to the political and applied dimensions of Cavell'due south idea, but too to the oldest and deepest layers of his philosophy as a whole, found in the essays he published in Must We Hateful What We Say? (1969), and in the beginning three parts of The Merits of Reason (1979) ... this is a deeply researched, clearly written, engaging and provocative book. There are insights on every page, and Norris is especially expert at recovering the early California Cavell of Mates, Clarke, and Austin, integrating Rousseau'southward version of the social contract with ordinary language philosophy, and articulating and defending Cavell's Emersonian Perfectionism." -- Russell B. Goodman, Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews

"Nosotros alive politically within individual antagonisms and factional oppositions. Values are reduced to preferences, and diff economic and political power decides whose preferences are unequally satisfied. In his passionate, patient, and acutely insightful study of Stanley Cavell's political thinking--the offset systematic work of its kind--Andrew Norris tracks Cavell'southward efforts to move united states of america across this condition and "toward the low-cal or instinct of freedom." There is no better identify to await for an account of the possibility of autonomous political hope."-- Richard Eldridge, Charles and Harriett Cox McDowell Professor of Philosophy, Swarthmore Higher

"Andrew Norris, a political theorist with deep philosophical grooming, has written a vivid book based on extensive scholarship that is clear in its exposition, comprehensive in its scope, and philosophically useful. If yous have resisted Cavell, this book should lead you to reconsider; if y'all have been attracted to Cavell, this volume will assistance y'all on your manner; if you have not known Cavell, this is where to start." -- Tracy Strong, Professor of Political Theory and Philosophy, Academy of Southampton

"Andrew Norris is an ideal reader of Cavell-a philosopher for whom reading texts, art, and people, and being read, in plow, by them are central concerns. Cavell's philosophy aims to recover the human voice, most specially one's own voice, from its "skeptical" denial in traditional skepticism and constructive metaphysics. Norris's originality lies in his sense of the intimacy of the connection between self-denial and self-recovery and in being alert to the upstanding and political implications of the idea that Cavell traces in the writings of Wittgenstein, Emerson and Thoreau, namely, that in gild to detect ourselves we must first lose ourselves." -- David Macarthur, Associate Professor of Philosophy, The University of Sydney

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