Stanley Cavell was, by many accounts, America's greatest philosophical thinker of film. Like Bazin in France and Perkins in England, Cavell did not just transform the American capacity to take film as a subject for philosophical criticism; he had to first invent that legitimacy. Part of that effort involved the creation of several key now-canonical texts in film studies, among them the seminal The World Viewed along with Pursuits of Happiness and Contesting Tears. The present collection offers, for the first time anywhere, a concerted effort mounted by some of today's most compelling writers on film to take careful account of Cavell's legacy. The contributors think anew about what precisely Cavell contributed, what holds up, what is in need to revision or updating, and how his writing continues to be of vital significance and relevance for any contemporary approach to the philosophy of film.

David LaRocca is the author, editor, or coeditor of more than a dozen books. He edited Movies with Stanley Cavell in Mind (Bloomsbury, 2021), Inheriting Stanley Cavell (Bloomsbury, 2020), a commemorative issue of Conversations: The Journal of Cavellian Studies (2019), and Stanley Cavell's Emerson's Transcendental Etudes (2003). He has taught philosophy and cinema and held visiting research or teaching positions in the United States at Binghamton University, Cornell University, Harvard University, Ithaca College, the School of Visual Arts, the State University of New York College at Cortland, and Vanderbilt University.