Thoreau’s observation that truth requires the departure or translation from the “monuments” constituted by our words provides the theme of this probing collection. Charting paths to and from Cavell’s own words in The Senses of Walden, these fine essays consider translation and the untranslatable, Cavell’s notions of the ordinary and of speaking out of a sense of impoverishment, and writers from Emerson to Terrence Malick.
- Russell B. Goodman, Regents Professor, Emeritus, University of New Mexico,
Saito and Standish are full-fledged masters of bringing the best excitement of living philosophical conversation in book form. Provoked by an enlarged sense of translation as more than decoding and of education as more than classroom learning, these essays bring us to feel that, as Cavell might say, we mostly use those words without meaning what we are saying. In an age when the simply practical or instrumental is in ascendence, this international collection is an event which will arrest resignation, recalling us to philosophy's and education's significance as existential transfiguration.
- Gordon C.F. Bearn, Professor of Philosophy, Lehigh University,
There is an important sense in which a demand for translation is internal to all thought and, by the same token, an important sense in which translation should be regarded as a topic for, and dimension of, philosophical investigation. That is organizing claim of Naoko Saito and Paul Standish’s brilliant new collection Stanley Cavell and Philosophy as Translation. The book offers something substantial not only to those committed to following philosophical conversations about themes of translation but also to those committed to exploring these conversations’ practical upshot. It makes an especially focused contribution to discussions of education as an enterprise that, far from being merely technical and problem-oriented, is capable of opening us to the ineluctable demand to exercise our own judgment in thinking.
- Alice Crary, Chair of Philosophy, New School for Social Research,