Here and There

“Filled with situated insights into the academic debates of the end of the last century and the beginning of our own… Readers will find it worthwhile to tune in. Nowhere else will one encounter the sounds one encounters in Stanley Cavell’s mixtapes.”—Michael S. Roth, Los Angeles Review of Books

“What comes across most powerfully…is Cavell’s attentive listening, throughout his long and distinguished career, for what one might call the hum of humanity.”—Christopher Benfey, New York Review of Books

“Cavell’s prose is suffused by the influence of the techniques and ethos of ordinary language philosophy—by its invitation to ask yourself what you would want or be tempted or inclined to say when. The auto-narrating trail Cavell leaves in his prose—his tendency to voice, even dramatize, his promptings or temptations to certain utterances—bears the unmistakable imprint of Austin’s and Wittgenstein’s methods.”—Lola Seaton, The Point

“The writings gathered here are sparkling examples of Stanley Cavell’s claim that a philosophical puzzle can arise anywhere in the weave of life. Originally composed for different occasions, collectively they now seem like a letter from beyond, addressing each reader as if Cavell were speaking directly to them.”—Veena Das, author of Life and Words

“In this collection’s essays on music, we find Cavell listening closely, hearing the ways that music works with philosophy to help us understand the world. Quoting Wittgenstein, he also aptly evokes the spirit of Here and There itself: ‘Who can understand my philosophical work who does not know what music has meant in my life?’”—John Harbison, Pulitzer Prize–winning composer and Institute Professor of Music, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

“Stanley Cavell was the most searingly brilliant and original philosopher of his generation. Again and again, these occasional essays, reviews, and lectures remind us why: sentences that take one’s breath away with their ethical urgency and existential precision, their baroque energy and lacerating honesty. Gratitude has to be one’s first response to the appearance of this collection.”—J. M. Bernstein, Distinguished Professor of Philosophy, The New School for Social Research