Suppose that a classic text is one whose ability to go on speaking to new generations of readers is grounded in the precision and depth of its address to its own time and place. Then a better understanding of the continuing fertility of Stanley Cavell's first book requires an appreciation of its penetratingly various engagements with North American culture in the late 1960s.

That culture's philosophy was divided between what were called “analytic” and “Continental” approaches to the subject, and—within the analytic side—between the earlier reception of logical positivism (with its attempted elevation of science and denigration of evaluative judgement) and the more recent reception of Wittgenstein's later philosophy (often affiliated with J. L. Austin's ways of affirming ordinary language). Its foremost artistic figures confronted the threats and opportunities of modernism (in the aftermath of the New Criticism, Abstract Expressionism and non-tonal music); and its political and moral life was wracked by inter-generational incomprehension and repudiation—a civil war of the spirit at once engendered by and fueling combat in foreign fields.