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The following books by Robert Paul Wolff are available on Amazon.com as e-books: KANT'S THEORY OF MENTAL ACTIVITY, THE AUTONOMY OF REASON, UNDERSTANDING MARX, UNDERSTANDING RAWLS, THE POVERTY OF LIBERALISM, A LIFE IN THE ACADEMY, MONEYBAGS MUST BE SO LUCKY, AN INTRODUCTION TO THE USE OF FORMAL METHODS IN POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY.
Now Available: Volumes I, II, III, and IV of the Collected Published and Unpublished Papers.

NOW AVAILABLE ON YOUTUBE: LECTURES ON KANT'S CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON. To view the lectures, go to YouTube and search for "Robert Paul Wolff Kant." There they will be.

NOW AVAILABLE ON YOUTUBE: LECTURES ON THE THOUGHT OF KARL MARX. To view the lectures, go to YouTube and search for Robert Paul Wolff Marx."





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Sunday, June 16, 2013

THE CONSOLATIONS OF PHILOSOPHY


Susie and I have now sufficiently penetrated the arcana of our FranceTelecom cable package here in Paris that we can locate movies on television and then, with a series of secret remote control maneuvres, get them to switch from the French dubbing back into the original English.  Last night, we stumbled upon that great old Cary Grant Katherine Hepburn comedy, Bringing Up Baby.  After we stopped laughing, I went on line to check on the identities of some of the supporting cast, and stumbled upon this philosophical gem.  I mean, I like Stanley, always have, but there are limits:

“Bringing Up Baby was the second of four films starring Grant and Hepburn; the others were Sylvia Scarlett (1935), Holiday (1938) and The Philadelphia Story (1940). Their last three belong to a sub-genre of screwball comedy known as the comedy of remarriage, described by philosopher Stanley Cavell as Hollywood's crowning achievement. Cavell noted that Bringing Up Baby was made in a tradition of romantic comedy with roots from ancient Rome to Shakespeare.”

2 comments:

David Auerbach said...

Holiday is quite wonderful and has a rare (certainly for the time) sympathetic portrait of an egalitarian academic couple!

Kevin said...

I do like Cavell... but there are days when I cannot roll my eyes far back enough, haha.