What does philosophy have to do with the human voice? Has contemporary philosophy banished the "voice" from the field of legitimate investigation? Timothy Gould examines these questions through the philosopher most responsible for formulating them, Stanley Cavell. "Hearing Things" is the first work to treat systematically the relation between Cavell's pervasive authorial voice and his equally powerful, though less discernible, impulse to produce a set of usable philosophical methods.
Gould argues that a tension between voice and method unites Cavell's broad and often perplexing range of...