Review: Stanley Cavell, ‘Little Did I Know: Excerpts from Memory’, Vol. 1, No. 5 (Summer 2011): 169-81.

Few philosophers write autobiographies. Even fewer write them more than once. Little Did I Know: Excerpts from Memory is Stanley Cavell’s second attempt at autobiographical exploration. And that’s only if we’re being strict with numbers. In many ways, Cavell’s entire approach to philosophy has been autobiographical—or at the very least, unusually personal. His work is deeply engaged with the question of what it might mean to live a philosophical life, with “why philosophy, of a certain ambition, tends perpetually to intersect the autobiographi- cal”.