Acculturating philosophy to its sounds: on Stanley Cavell’s phonemic writing
David LaRocca (SUNY Cortland)
David LaRocca will present a reduced version of his contribution to Walden in Tokyo: Stanley Cavell and the Thought of Other Cultures (Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 59, Issue 5-6, October-December 2025, Pages 1056–1074, https://doi.org/10.1093/jopedu/qhaf049). The closing words of the Claim of Reason—‘But can philosophy become literature and still know itself?’—accentuate Cavell’s particular concern with the relationship between philosophy and literature. LaRocca borrows Garrett Stewart’s notion of ‘phonemic reading’ to propose Cavell as a phonemic writer—teaching philosophy and literature about one another through the sound and soundness of the lettered wor(l)d.
David LaRocca, who studied philosophy, film, rhetoric, and religion at Buffalo, Berkeley, Vanderbilt, and Harvard, is the author or contributing editor of twenty-one books, including several devoted to the work and legacy of Stanley Cavell. Additionally, he has recently completed a trilogy of books with and about Garrett Stewart. He is the author of Emerson’s English Traits and the Natural History of Metaphor, research for which he conducted while serving as Harvard University’s Sinclair Kennedy Fellow in the United Kingdom. More information at www.DavidLaRocca.org.