At the time of his death in 2007, Richard Rorty was widely acclaimed as one of the world's most influential contemporary thinkers. Stanley Cavell, who has been a leading intellectual figure from the 1960s to the present, has been just as philosophically influential as Rorty though perhaps not as politically divisive. Both philosophers have developed from analytic to post-analytical thought, both move between philosophy, literature and cultural politics, and both re-establish American philosophical traditions in a new and nuanced key.

The Ironist and the Romantic: Reading Richard...