Contending With Stanley Cavell

Stanley Cavell has been a brilliant, idiosyncratic, and controversial presence in American philosophy, literary criticism, and cultural studies for years. Even as he continues to produce new writing of a high standard -- an example of which is included in this collection -- his work haselicited responses from a new generation of writers in Europe and America. This collection showcases this new work, while illustrating the variety of Cavell's interests: in the "ordinary language" philosophy of Wittgenstein and Austin, in film criticism and theory, in literature, psychoanalysis, andthe American transcendentalism of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. The collection also reprints Richard Rorty's early review of Cavell's magnum opus, The Claim of Reason (1979), and it concludes with Cavell's substantial set of responses to the essays, a highlight of which is his engagement with Rorty.

Russell B. Goodman grew up in New York, and studied philosophy at Oxford and Johns Hopkins. He has written Wittgenstein and William James (Cambridge 2002) and American Philosophy and the Romantic Tradition (Cambridge 1990), and is the editor of Pragmatism: A Contemporary Reader (Routledge, 1995). In 2003 he directed a National Endowment for the Humanities summer institute on Ralph Waldo Emerson.