Also Noted
Stanley Cavell, 91, a onetime jazz pianist who traded music for philosophy but maintained an abiding interest in the arts, mining screwball comedies, Shakespearean dramas and postwar "new music" for philosophical insights, died June 19 in Boston.
Cavell taught at Harvard University for more than three decades but was often treated as something of an outsider, alternately scorned and celebrated by colleagues who noted that his books strayed far from the confines of traditional philosophy.
While other scholars devoted decades to the subtleties of Aristotle or the intricacies of Kant, Cavell's work encompassed a study of self-deception in "King Lear," commentaries on the Vienna-born philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein and examinations of the links between Emerson and "The Philadelphia Story," John Locke and "Adam's Rib."
A student of J.L. Austin, who sought to resolve philosophical problems by using "ordinary language" in place of academic jargon, Cavell made major contributions to the philosophy of language as well as to ethics, aesthetics and epistemology, the branch of philosophy that addresses knowledge and belief.
Stanley Goldstein was born in Atlanta on Sept. 1, 1926. He later changed his name, Anglicizing his family's original Polish name of Kavelieruskii.
James E. Gips, 72, who helped create a device that would change the life of countless people with disabilities, died June 10 at his home in Medfield, Mass.
From an initial brainstorming session in 1992 at Boston College, Gips, along with Prof. Peter Olivieri and a colleague in the psychology department, Joseph Tecce, who had been studying eye blink rates, came up with EagleEyes, a technology that uses electrodes placed around the eyes to allow a user to control the computer with eye movements.
EagleEyes and a subsequent technology, Camera Mouse, which Gips developed with Margrit Betke, have opened up computer use — and thus communication — to all sorts of people who, for one reason or another, cannot use a conventional computer mouse. They include nonverbal people, many of them children, whose disabilities had led others to assume that they had no intellectual life.
