Life
Born to a Jewish family in Atlanta, Georgia, Cavell first trained in music, graduating with a B.A. in music at the University of California, Berkeley in 1947. Shortly after being accepted at Juilliard, he gave up studying music and changed to philosophy, studying at UCLA before finishing his Ph.D at Harvard University. As a student there he came under the influence of the visiting J. L. Austin, whose teaching and methods "knocked him off... horse."
Cavell's first teaching position was at Berkeley, but he returned to Harvard, where he became the Walter M. Cabot Professor of Aesthetics and the General Theory of Value in 1963. For the academic year 1970-1971, he was a Fellow on the faculty at the Center for the Humanities of Wesleyan University. Cavell received a MacArthur Fellowship in 1992. In 1997 he became Professor Emeritus at Harvard. On May 7, 2010, he was made Doctor Honoris Causa of the Ecole Normale Supérieure de Lyon.
Currently, Cavell resides in Brookline, Massachusetts with his wife. Their grown son, David, lives nearby.
Read more about this topic: Stanley Cavell
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