Abstract

This article explores the reception of the philosophy of Martin Heidegger within Stanley Cavell’s work. Overall, it argues that Cavell’s reinterpretation of Heideggerian motifs, although often idiosyncratic, has been a crucial aspect of his fruitful and influential quarrel with analytic philosophy, as well as of his attempt to recover Emerson and Thoreau from their marginalization in American philosophical academia. In order to do so, the article will discuss the context of Cavell’s philosophical upbringing; reflect on the timing and institutional circumstances of the translation of Heidegger’s texts in English; compare Cavell’s unpublished PhD dissertation with his published work and thus correct some common assumptions concerning the actual start of his absorption of Being and Time; and analyze the growingly literary, rather than technical, mode of engagement which follows Cavell’s discovery of Heidegger’s later philosophy.