Stanley Cavell, American philosopher and long-time professor of philosophy at Harvard University, has written on epistemology, philosophy of language, moral philosophy, and aesthetics; on Shakespeare and Romanticism and Samuel Beckett; on modernism in the arts, classic Hollywood film comedies and melodramas of the 1930s and 1940s, and opera; on his most direct influences, J. L. Austin and Ludwig Wittgenstein, especially with reference to their attempts to draw words back to their everyday homes; on Friedrich Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger, who articulate our perhaps inevitable ambivalence toward what the latter calls "average everydayness"; on Kant, who in limiting knowledge to make room for faith makes the conditions and boundaries of human understanding and the recognition of our finitude dominant themes for subsequent thought; and also on the Kantian inheritance in the transcendentalism of Thoreau and Emerson, who conceptualize these issues in terms of lost contact...