Cities of Words: Pedagogical Letters on a Register if the Moral Life

Stanley Cavell's book Cities of Words is a fascinating hybrid of philosophy and film criticism, as he focuses on Hollywood "remarriage comedies" of the 1930s and 1940s (The Philadelphia Story, Adam's Rib, Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, It Happened One Night, etc.) to show how they influenced popular conceptions of morality and the good life. Throughout the book, he has interesting comparative insights into classical philosophy:

Plato's idea of a path to one goal (the one sought by the sage) does not exactly fit Emerson's idea of how to live. In both, the idea of philosophy as a way of life plays a role in assessing your life now, but Emerson is less interested in holding up the life of the sage as a model for ours than in reminding us that the power of questioning our lives in, say, our judgment of what we call their necessities, and their rights and goods, is within the scope of every human being (of those, at any rate, free to talk about their lives and to modify them).

Recommended.