Building upon their earlier collection (Stanley Cavell and the Education of Grownups (2011)) and anticipating another (Walden in Tokyo and the Thought of Other Cultures (forthcoming)), Stanley Cavell and Philosophy as Translation adds to the significant body of scholarship authored and edited by Saito and Standish exploring the relevance of Cavell's work to the philosophy of education. The book's epigraph is Thoreau's perception: “The volatile truth of our words should continually betray the inadequacy of the residual statement. Their truth is instantly translated; its literal monument alone remains” (1). As Cavell suggests in Walden in Tokyo, Walden “can be taken as a whole to be precisely about the problem of translation, call it transfiguration from one form of life to another” (6).

French philosopher Sandra Laugier, who contributes a compelling chapter, has translated The Claim of Reason and others of Cavell's works; Saito has translated The Senses of Walden into Japanese. The focus of Stanley Cavell and Philosophy as Translation, however, is not interlingual conversion but translation as a “philosophical and educational theme” (1), approached from a Cavell-inspired position whereby translation, more than a “vague metaphor for transformation” (2), might be seen productively as internal to philosophy, language, and thought. (This notion of one phenomenon as “internal” to another, so often deployed by Cavell and in Cavell scholarship, feels underexplored relative to its argumentative work and recurrence; in A Pluralistic Universe (1908) William James associates internality, notably, with monistic idealism, juxtaposing these with the pluralist externalities of his preferred empiricism.) The opening four chapters make a convincing case that translation, in turn, offers an instructive way of articulating notions of selfhood and culture at the heart of Cavell's philosophy.

The collection is productively ambivalent about upholding or blurring boundaries between Cavell and pragmatism. The editors reiterate that Emerson and Cavell have been “misunderstood” through “incorporation into a conception of American philosophy as pragmatism” (4), Laugier's chapter somewhat inverting this by incorporating pragmatism and American philosophy alike into an expansive philosophy of the ordinary. Saito's notion of a transcendentalist ordinary, characterized by “the need to find a measure of life where there is no ‘fixed and immovable fulcrum’” (18), sounds comfortably (or uncomfortably) pragmatist, likewise Standish's contention that Cavell's thought “unsettles our tendencies toward consolidation, and … retrieves us from damnation” (177). Cavell's misgivings about pragmatism are by now well established, and Megan J. Laverty's discussion of Dewey “after” Cavell is valuable, to my mind, for placing the two thinkers in closer proximity than these misgivings encourage. Dewey's description of communication as “a wonder by the side of which transubstantiation pales” (128) is strikingly resonant with The Senses of Walden.

A passage of endless interest to Cavell in Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations (1953) reflects, “If I have exhausted the justifications I have reached bedrock, and my spade is turned. Then I am inclined to say: ‘This is simply what I do’” (§217). As Vincent Colapetrio's chapter emphasizes, Cavell reads this moment as one of passivity and anxiety rather than power and exclusion. Encountering in the pupil a divergent sensibility, the teacher is confronted with an inability to articulate any transcendent or rule-based justification. Cavellians have not always seemed attuned in spirit to this moral, however, insofar as their potential philosophical antagonists are understood not as divergent sensibilities but as lacking sensibility (“tone-deaf” (274)); passivity is thus reinscribed as power. The chapters of Stanley Cavell and Philosophy as Translation take issue variously with “the complacency of taking language to be a tool” (4); “the contemporary reassertion of scientific naturalism” (5); Dewey's “coming up with solutions, and thus … regaining control” (78); teaching “translated into and naturalized as a problem-solving process” (93); Platonic assumptions about extralinguistic concepts “persistent in some analytic philosophy circles” (142); philosophers apt to find the (“internal”) relationship between philosophy and autobiography “scandalous” (160); and “[i]nstitutionalized philosophy” with its “fated arrogance,” and its neglect of Thoreau and Emerson (161).

Readers hoping for sustained critique of Cavell's ideas will need to look elsewhere –or return to the sharp self-interruptions characterizing Cavell's own writing. The collection's ultimate and considerable strength, however, is its balance between lucid, authoritative explication and the projection of Cavell's ideas into new contexts. Approaching Cavell thematically retains the volatility of his work, far preferable to the ill-conceived revival of the literal monument of ordinary-language philosophy, proposed by some as a philosophical–theoretical corrective to a post-structuralism in any case long gone.