•  5
    The Bloomsbury anthology of transcendental thought: from antiquity to the Anthropocene (edited book)
    Bloomsbury Academic, an imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. 2017.
    In this uniquely and timely collection, David LaRocca offers us a thoughtful reminder that the very possibility and urgent task of thinking, of our acting and judging, ethics and politics, rests upon a willing exposure to an aspect of our everyday and ordinary experience that is hard to grasp and eludes most, perhaps all, epistemic criteria. Metaphysicians, mystics, and moral perfectionists of all stripes have called this 'the transcendental', thus risking the fatal misunderstanding that this me…Read more
  •  11
    Two Wrongs Make a Right
    In Robert Arp, Steven Barbone & Michael Bruce (eds.), Bad Arguments, Wiley. 2018-05-09.
    This chapter focuses on one of the common fallacies in Western philosophy, “two wrongs make a right”. If the notion that “two wrongs make a right” seems familiar and peculiarly stated, it may be because we moreover hear it in other more commonly rendered forms. To say “two wrongs do not make a right”, necessarily implies a wholesale condemnation of retributive justice. Retributive justice, despite its largely sanitized form in contemporary society, retains the core idea that justice can be achie…Read more
  •  8
    Boba Fett's cultural significance stands in striking contrast with his minimal screen time, and even more so with his infrequent and tersely spoken lines. With Boba Fett, a small head tilt, as well as how he cradles his gun become important signs. Boba Fett's status as an intermediary might make him seem amoral relativist. As is often the case with characters in Star Wars, Boba Fett has father issues. Bounty hunting in Boba's work occupies a gray zone between the white of his clone trooper breth…Read more
  • Music with Stanley Cavell in mind (edited book)
    Bloomsbury Academic. 2024.
    Music with Stanley Cavell in Mind provides a first-of-its-kind intervention by leading philosophers and scholars of music into an intellectual landscape in need of such charting. As a performer and a devoted student of music, the arc of Cavell's wide-ranging investigation maps consistently with a proximate concern with features of human experience that involve music and sound, including the sound of prose, authorial voice (including its possession and its divestment), the presence/problem/potent…Read more
  •  6
    ‘It's all there in the language’—a conversation with Garrett Stewart
    Philosophical Investigations 47 (3): 278-297. 2024.
    What does a famed literary theorist have to say about the interaction between ‘literature’ and ‘philosophy’? Well, if he's Garrett Stewart, the celebrated agent of pyrotechnic style in the service of durable insights across disparate disciplines and media, then we have much reason to lean in and listen. Stewart is the author of 20 books that range with uncanny competency across Victorian narrative, contemporary American fiction, written auralities, poetics and prose stylistics, cinematic evoluti…Read more
  •  6
    Note to Self: Learn to Write Autobiographical Remarks from Wittgenstein
    In Sascha Bru, Wolfgang Huemer & Daniel Steuer (eds.), Wittgenstein Reading, De Gruyter. pp. 319-334. 2013.
  •  30
    The Education of Grown-ups: An Aesthetics of Reading Cavell
    Journal of Aesthetic Education 47 (2): 109-131. 2013.
    But then I think of how often I have cast the world I want to live in as one in which my capacities for playfulness and for seriousness are not used against one another, so against me. I am the lady they always want to saw in half. Just as there was a time when it was uncommon, not to say unfashionable and perhaps professionally treacherous, for philosophers to write about Ralph Waldo Emerson, there was also a time when the pertinence of Stanley Cavell’s work for philosophy was a point of contro…Read more
  •  11
    The philosophy of war films (edited book)
    University Press of Kentucky. 2014.
    Wars have played a momentous role in shaping the course of human history. The ever-present specter of conflict has made it an enduring topic of interest in popular culture, and many movies, from Hollywood blockbusters to independent films, have sought to show the complexities and horrors of war on-screen. In The Philosophy of War Films, David LaRocca compiles a series of essays by prominent scholars that examine the impact of representing war in film and the influence that cinematic images of ba…Read more
  •  11
    Movies with Stanley Cavell in mind (edited book)
    Bloomsbury Academic. 2021.
    In Movies with Stanley Cavell in Mind, some of the scholars who have become essential for our understanding of Stanley Cavell's writing on film gather to use his landmark contributions to help us read new films-from Hollywood and elsewhere-films that exist beyond his immediate reach and reading. In extending the scope of Cavell's film-philosophy, we naturally find ourselves contending with it and amending it, as the case may be. Through a series of interpretive vignettes, our group effort situat…Read more
  •  4
    The Geschlecht Complex: Addressing Untranslatable Aspects of Gender, Genre, and Ontology (edited book)
    with Oscar Jansson
    Bloomsbury Publishing USA. 2022.
    "The notion of Geschlecht - denoting gender, genre, kinship, and more - exemplifies the most pertinent questions of the transnational and transdisciplinary structures of contemporary humanities. What happens in the transference from one language, tradition, or form to another? Combining detailed case studies of "category problems" in literature, philosophy, theatre, media, cinema, and performing arts, with excerpts from canonical texts-by field-defining thinkers such as Derrida, Malabou, Nancy, …Read more
  •  9
    Changing the Subject
    Epoché: A Journal for the History of Philosophy 12 (1): 169-184. 2007.
    In this essay, I investigate our understanding of what counts as philosophical. Using the life and work of Wittgenstein as a test case, I take a close look at how various Wittgenstein scholars relate to work other than the principal and accepted philosophical texts (such as the Tractatus and the Philosophical Investigations), and suggest that there is an inconsistency in the criteria of what we can and should be taking seriously for philosophical purposes; sometimes there is inconsistency of use…Read more
  •  5
    "Accomplished scholars and writers-some of them lifelong friends, students, and colleagues, others strangers and skeptical critics of Stanley Cavell-think and re-think the nature of their personal, impersonal intellectual indebtedness to Cavell's half-century of contributions to philosophy, religion, literary studies, music, and cinema"--
  •  18
    The Limits of Instruction
    Film and Philosophy 13 35-50. 2009.
  •  15
    The Philosophy of Documentary Film: Image, Sound, Fiction, Truth (edited book)
    Philosophy of Popular Culture. 2016.
    Perhaps nowhere in the broad expanse of types of film is the old "quarrel between philosophy and poetry" more evident--and also more vitally relevant--than in the genre or mode of film known as documentary. Documentary film is just another form of poetic imitation, in its variety of instances and complexity of fabrication, it is just as much caught up with the limitations--and effects--of mimetic art, including fiction film. This book affords a prismatic perspective on documentary cinema, inviti…Read more
  •  37
    How can one teach what one does not know? Most film depictions of teaching follow a satisfying (and it would seem endlessly entertaining) Aristotelian dramatic structure. But what if the teacher does not know what she is summoned to teach? And what if there were a theory of pedagogy that celebrated a teacher's ignorance rather than her authority (power, position, privilege, pre-established role) or expertise (knowledge, experience, judgment)? How or why, in Jacques Rancière’s parlance, an ‘ignor…Read more
  •  38
    The Philosophy of Documentary Film (edited book)
    Lexington Books. 2016.
    Perhaps nowhere in the broad expanse of types of film is the old “quarrel between philosophy and poetry” more evident—and also more vitally relevant—than in the genre or mode of film known as documentary. Documentary film is just another form of poetic imitation, in its variety of instances and complexity of fabrication, it is just as much caught up with the limitations—and effects—of mimetic art, including fiction film. This book affords a prismatic perspective on documentary cinema, inviting t…Read more