Maggs Bros.

Inscribed by the author ‘For Is from Stanley November 1979’ in blue ink to the front free endpaper.

‘Cavell’s most single-mindedly “philosophical” book, in terms of the analytical tradition’s self-conception of philosophy, is The Claim of Reason. The first three of its four parts are a revision of his Harvard doctoral thesis, The Claim to Rationality, and present his understanding of Wittgenstein’s and Austin’s philosophical procedures. The central issues are skepticism (one might say, the threat of skepticism as that threat has been perceived to be internal to the tradition of modern philosophy since Descartes) and the relevance of the work of Wittgenstein and Austin to skepticism. Part IV “Skepticism and the Problem of Others: Between Acknowledgment and Avoidance,” written considerably later than the rest of the book, carries through this investigation in a somewhat changed voice. I shall look rather closely below at Part III, “Knowledge and the Concept of Morality,” since this is one of the central places in all of Cavell’s writing where he encounters directly the literature of academic analytical ethical theory’ (Bates, ‘Stanley Cavell and Ethics’, pp. 16-17).