Anticipations of Freedom: Engaging Stanley Cavell

Stanley Cavell's critical-aesthetic way of doing philosophy charts a unique path between dogmatic doctrinalism and dull despair in response to the alienations that trouble modern divided life. His methods of attention to cultural phenomena are rooted in a philosophical anthropology that sees human subjects as forever fated to live between complete reconciliation and individualist-instrumentalist transactionalism.

Some works of literature, music, and film, he finds, arrest and absorb their a...