Stanley Cavell

American philosopher at Harvard who wrote The World Viewed (on film), The Claim of Reason (on Wittgenstein), and Pursuits of Happiness (on Hollywood comedy of remarriage) — and who made Emerson and Thoreau philosophically central in a way they had not been in analytic philosophy.

Argued that ordinary language philosophy (Wittgenstein, Austin) reveals not logical structure but what Cavell calls 'criteria' — the conditions under which claims make sense — and that film is the philosophical medium of modernity because it captures our skeptical relationship to the external world.