This volume is a collection of readings from the work of Stanley Cavell, an influential 20th-century American philosopher. It provides those who are unfamiliar with Cavell's work with an overview of its strategic purpose, its central themes and its argumentative development.

Acknowledgements vii Introduction 1 Prologue: The Avoidance of Love (The Abdication Scene) 22 1. The Normal and the Natural 31 2. Knowing and Acknowledging 46 3. "The Frog and the Craftsman" 72 4. The Avoidance of Love (External-World Skepticism) 89 5. Ending the Waiting Game 94 6. Music Discomposed 113 7. Kierkegaard's On Authority and Revelation 127 8. The Avoidance of Love (Theater) 143 9. "Photograph, Screen, and Star" 156 10. The Same and Different: The Awful Truth 167 11. Macbeth Appalled 197 12. Psychoanalysis and Cinema: The Melodrama of the Unknown Woman 221 13. The Ordinary as the Uneventful 253 14. Words and Sentences 260 15. Being Odd, Getting Even 295 16. Declining Decline 321 17. Moral Perfectionism 353 Epilogue: The Investigations' Everyday Aesthetics of Itself 369 Stanley Cavell: A Bibliography 1951-1995 390 Index of Themes and Concepts 415 Index of Names and Titles 418