www.film-philosophy.com 50 Cavellian Meditations: How to Do Things with Film and

It is a curious feature of philosophical writing that authors rarely reflect on what motivates their concern with a chosen topic. The importance of a philosophical problem, argument, or discourse is assumed to be self-evident; or the kind of self-reflection that philosophers otherwise bring to their reflections is deemed unseemly when applied to one’s own commitment to philosophy. Among the many reasons why Stanley Cavell remains anomalous in contemporary philosophy is his acknowledgment of the biographical aspect, or more exaltedly, the existential commitments of his own writing. He tells the story, for example, of how his coming to philosophy was inspired by his experience of particular texts, both philosophical and non-philosophical, an experience that was as much about writing and reading as about reflection and understanding. It was not only the philosophical power and originality of Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations that inspired Cavell’s desire to do philosophy but the fact that it was the first text he read that ‘staked its teaching on showing that we do not know, or make ourselves forget, what reading is ’ (Cavell 2006, 28). Cinema too was a spur to philosophy, Cavell naming three films that suggested to him new possibilities of philosophical thought and expression