Introduction

Abstract Cavell’s writing offers and enacts a distinctive conception of human being in the world. Human beings are embodied animals, thrown into recalcitrant nature and a divided and conflictual social world, but also capable of arrest by and absorption in moments of experience. Working through these moments critically offers an open-ended mode of address to problems of meaning in life and of satisfaction in activity that avoids the various dogmatisms and despairs of rationalism, empiricism, existentialism, structuralism, and post-structuralism. His work helps us to know how to go on in exercising distinctively human powers of meaning-making democratically and in more satisfying ways that also always remain bounded and partial.